The production of relative clauses by Italian cochlear-implanted and hearing children

• Italian cochlear-implanted (CI) children were tested on a sentence production task.
• CI children are less accurate than three groups of normal hearing children.
• For CI children, subject relatives (SR) are more accurate than object relatives (OR).
• When SRs and ORs are targeted, CI children used various answering strategies.
• Individual performance variability within the CI group is observed.

This study investigates the elicited production of subject (SRs) and object relatives (ORs) in Italian by 13 cochlear-implanted (CI) children (age: 7;9–10;8) to determine whether and to what extent they differ from three groups of 13 normal hearing (NH) children matched on morphosyntactic abilities (age: 5;0–7;9), chronological age (age: 7;5–10;3), and auditory age (e.g. duration of CI use (age: 4;11–9;4)) respectively.Results showed that for CI children, SRs are more accurate than ORs. The same asymmetry is observed in all NH groups, although NH children's percentages of target responses are higher for both sentence typologies.The syntactic difficulty with ORs led CI and NH groups to adopt a considerable number of answering strategies: among them, production of passive relatives, causative constructions, and wh- elements replacing the complementizer che (‘that’).Individual performance variability within the CI group is observed. Some CI children showed good competence in Italian and age-peer performance by producing passive relatives, which are largely attested in older children's production. For other CI children, however, the tendency to produce sentences attested in young children's production is evidence of the linguistic delay associated to hearing impairment. In this case, the performance of these CI children was comparable to that of younger NH children.