ABSTRACT
Studies of complex sentences in children with language impairment vary in the focus of enquiry, the ages of children involved, and in the procedures used to explore the children's competence. Other developmental disabilities that have attracted the attention of researchers in relation to syntactic impairment are Williams syndrome, Down syndrome, and autism. The issue of individual variability in linguistic ability, apparent in Williams syndrome and Down syndrome, arises again in autism spectrum disorder. One approach—syntactic-semantic therapy—involved using a metalinguistic approach called shape coding to link the distinct verb meanings to the appropriate syntactic construction. Mastering verbs and the syntactic company they keep will facilitate the organization of simple sentence structures, but English noun phrase structure also presents a test for the learner. The descriptive shorthand for the canonical English simple sentence is SVO: subject–transitive verb–object. Object relatives with certain lexical features, which are more common in the speech that children hear, are as easy to process as subject relatives.
