The acquisition of complex words and sentences in German speaking children with Cochlear Implants

The experimental group consists of German-speaking children with CI of school age (age range about 7-11). At least we will test 50 children with CI. For investigating the production of relative clauses we will employ the preference task (Friedmann & Szterman 2006). The children are orally presented with sentences expressing two options and have to choose what they prefer. The task is constructed in such a way that the choice would have to be formed as a relative clause. Using a preference question allows to elicit relative clauses without letting the children know that their syntax is assessed. The task involves no pictures in order for to prevent pointing to the intended picture as an alternative answer. Normal hearing children acquire their mother tongue rapidly, without explicit training or structured input, and with few wrong turns. Completed and current research in the field of language development in children with a cochlear implant (CI) at the University of Salzburg gives rise to the assumption that even CI-children with high phonetic competence have various problems at the level of grammar. Former studies in the syntactic competence of CI-children discovered problems in so called “syntactic movement”, for example in relative sentences (Friedmann & Szeterman, 2006; Friedmann et al., 2008). The overriding intention of the present study aims at investigating the acquisition of wh-movement constructions (wh-questions, relative clause) in two groups of children who are acquiring German as their first language: typically developing children (TD) and children with a cochlear implant (CI). Additionally, we want to find out whether German speaking children with CI will also face problems with complex words at the interface of morphology and syntax.