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This study examines young children's production of head-final relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese. Three different hypotheses (the Canonical Word Order Hypothesis, the Filler-gap Linear Distance Hypothesis, and the Structural Distance Hypothesis) have been proposed to account for the subject-object asymmetry found in children's performance with head-initial RCs in English. The structure of Chinese head-final RCs is minimally different from that of English head-initial RCs and thus provides an ideal case to examine the effect of different factors that are confounded in English. Our findings fail to support the Canonical Word Order Hypothesis and the Filler-gap Linear Distance Hypothesis. Instead, we suggest that it is the gap position in the hierarchical structure that affects children's production performance with subject-gapped and object-gapped RCs. Our findings also suggest that Mandarin Chinese does not belong to the group of East Asian languages which has been argued to have an acquisition pattern for RCs that is different from the one found in European languages. In addition, the cross-linguistic comparison of production errors suggests that the occurrence of the head noun in the sequential order of the production string affects the type of errors children make during the sentence production process.

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This study investigated why object-gap relative clauses (RCs) are dominant in early child Mandarin. We discuss how restrictive-RCs differ from pseudo-RCs syntactically and pragmatically, and examine how these two types of RCs are distributed in the RC utterances of ten children and their caregivers. The results showed that (a) Mandarin-speaking children produce many more pseudo-RCs than restrictive-RCs, (b) restrictive-RCs exhibit a subject-gap advantage and are dominantly headed, and (c) pseudo-RCs exhibit an object-gap advantage and are dominantly headless. We propose that the development of restrictive-RCs is mainly influenced by the structural factor, and that the extensive use of pseudo-RCs is attributed to the communicative needs of young children. Our findings also suggest that young children’s pseudo-RCs tend to have a subject-focus reading, and the object-gap dominance observed in the pseudo-RCs of child Mandarin is related to the head-final RCs and the special structural features of the cleft construction in Mandarin.