Purpose: Aims of this research were (a) to investigate higher order linguistic and cognitive skills of Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs); (b) to correlate them with the comprehension of irony, which has never been systematically studied in this population; and (c) to identify the factors that facilitate the development of this competence. Method: We tested 28 Italian children with CI (mean chronological age = 101 [ SD = 25.60] months, age range: 60–144 months), and two control groups of normal-hearing (NH) peers matched for chronological age and for hearing age, on a series of tests assessing their cognitive abilities (nonverbal intelligence and theory of mind), linguistic skills (morphosyntax and prosody recognition), and irony comprehension. Results: Despite having grammatical abilities in line with the group of NH children matched for hearing age, children with CI lag behind both groups of NH peers on the recognition of emotions through prosody and on the comprehension of ironic stories, even if these two abilities were not related. Conclusions: This is the first study that targeted irony comprehension in children with CI, and we found that this competence, which is crucial for maintaining good social relationships with peers, is impaired in this population. In line with other studies, we found a correlation between this ability and advanced theory of mind skills, but at the same time, a deeper investigation is needed, to account for the high variability of performance in children with CI.

Previous research has hypothesized that human sequential processing may be dependent upon hearing experience (the “auditory scaffolding hypothesis”), predicting that sequential rule learning abilities should be hindered by congenital deafness. To test this hypothesis, we compared deaf signer and hearing individuals’ ability to acquire rules of different computational complexity in a visual artificial grammar learning task using sequential stimuli. As a group, deaf participants succeeded at all levels of the task; Bayesian analysis indicates that they successfully acquired each of several target grammars at ascending levels of the formal language hierarchy. Overall, these results do not support the auditory scaffolding hypothesis. However, age‐ and education‐matched hearing participants did outperform deaf participants in two out of three tested grammars. We suggest that this difference may be related to verbal recoding strategies in the two groups. Any verbal recoding strategies used by the deaf signers would be less effective because they would have to use the same visual channel required for the experimental task.

Relativization is a robust subordinating type across languages, displaying important typological variability concerning the position of the nominal head that the relative clause modifies, and sign languages are no exception. It has been widely assumed since Keenan & Comrie (1977) that the subject position is more accessible to relativization than object and oblique positions. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the extension of this famous generalization both across modalities (sign as opposed to spoken languages) and across relativization typologies (internally as opposed to externally headed relatives), and to verify how it interacts with age of first language exposure. We here report the results of a sentence-to-picture matching task assessing the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) in three sign languages: French Sign Language (LSF), Catalan Sign Language (LSC), and Italian Sign Language (LIS). The results are that object RCs are never easier to comprehend than subject RCs. Remarkably, this is independent from the type of relative clause (internally or externally headed). As for the impact of age of exposure, we found that native signers outperform non-native signers and that a delay in language exposure emphasizes the subject/object asymmetry. Our results introduce a new potential diagnostic for LF movement: the existence of a Subject Advantage in comprehension can be used as a reliable and measurable cue for the existence of long-distance dependencies, including covert ones.