Comprehension and production of relative clauses in Mandarin-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

Abstract

This study investigates the comprehension and production of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin-speaking preschool- and school-age children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Twenty-one children with DLD (aged 4;2–8;4) and 42 typically developing (TD) children (aged 3;10–8;0) were tested. The results revealed that children with DLD showed no asymmetry between subject RCs (SRCs) and object RCs (ORCs) in comprehension, but demonstrated an SRC advantage in production. They performed less accurately than TD children in both SRCs and ORCs, with TD children exhibiting a clear SRC advantage in both comprehension and production. Moreover, children with DLD displayed a discrepancy between comprehension and production of ORCs, and their working memory capacity was positively associated with RC production. These findings provide novel evidence that Mandarin-speaking children with DLD face significant challenges in acquiring both SRCs and ORCs, offering insights into the nature of syntactic deficits in DLD.