Typical and Impaired Processing in Morphosyntax

Children with Down syndrome (DS) have difficulty comprehending complex syntactic structures. Ring and Clahsen (2005) attribute these problems to a specific syntactic deficit that affects A(=argument) movement. We investigated the comprehension of passive sentences (A-movement) and wh -questions ( wh -movement) in 22 German children and adolescents with DS compared to mental-age matched typically developing children. The results suggest that an impairment in the syntactic development affecting al