The role of grammatical gender and number in the comprehension of relative clauses among children with specific language impairment

Sa？etak This study sought to determine whether a difference in gender and number of the head noun facilitates the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses within a group of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) aged between 6 and 11 years. The comprehension of these complex syntactic structures was assessed using a task in which children had to answer questions designed to check their understanding of thematic roles in a relative clause. The results demonstrated that object relative clauses were more difficult to comprehend than subject relative clauses. On the other hand, children aged 8 to 11 years were more successful than those in the younger group (6-7 years) at understanding object relative clauses that varied in morphological characteristics (singular-plural, feminine-masculine). These results provide further insight into the linguistic nature of SLI and have implications for therapy