The aim of this study is to explore whether and how marked features (plural) modulate the comprehension of relative clauses in hearing-impaired children receiving a cochlear implant and normal-hearing children. Hearing impairment is a sensory impairment involving delayed access to linguistic input, which is reduced from both a quantitative and qualitative point of view. A limited exposure to the linguistic input during the sensitive period has remarkable consequences on the development of syntactic abilities. A number of studies investigating the linguistic competence of hearing-impaired individuals with different degrees of hearing loss found that they avoid complex sentences and experience difficulties in the use of functional categories, which are crucial to derive the meaning of the sentence (for English, De Villiers, 1988; De Villiers et al., 1994; for French, Delage & Tuller, 2007; Delage, 2008; for Italian, Caselli et al., 1994; Chesi, 2006; Rinaldi & Caselli, 2009; Volpato & Adani, 2009; Volpato, 2010). Both the comprehension and production of complex sentences involving long-distance dependencies, as for instance relative clauses, has proven to be especially problematic for this population across different languages (Quigley, Smith & Wilbur, 1974; De Villiers, 1988, for English; Friedmann & Sztermann, 2006; Friedmann et al., 2008 for Hebrew; Delage, 2008; Delage et al., 2008, for French; Volpato & Adani, 2009; Volpato, 2010, for Italian). 1 Although individuals with hearing loss show a pattern of performance comparable to individuals with normal hearing, namely also for them subject relatives are easier than object relatives, overall hearingimpaired individuals perform significantly lower than hearing ones.