A New Look at the Acquisition of Relative Clauses

Abstract

This study reconsiders the acquisition of relative clauses based on data from two sentencerepetition tasks. Using materials modeled on the relative constructions of spontaneous child speech, we asked four-year-old English-and German-speaking children to repeat six different types of relative clauses. Although English and German relative clauses are structurally very different, the results were similar across studies: intransitive subject relatives caused fewer errors than transitive subject relatives and direct object relatives, which in turn caused fewer errors than indirect object relatives and oblique relatives; finally, genitive relatives caused by far the most problems. Challenging previous analyses in which the acquisition of relative clauses has been explained by the varying distance between filler and gap, we propose a multifactorial analysis in which the acquisition process is determined primarily by the similarity between the various types of relative clauses and their relationship to simple sentences.

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

“…The current findings cannot be explained by di¤erent gap positions in subject and object relatives (e.g., Frazier and Clifton 1989;Friedmann and Novogrodsky 2004), nor can they be fully explained by di¤erent subject-object or agent-patient orderings in subjectand object relatives (e.g., Bever 1970;Diessel and Tomasello 2005). Instead, we suggest that the di‰culties with object relatives reported in previous studies were due to the fact that the test sentences did not match the object relatives that children and adults had experienced before.…”

“…Independent of any linguistic theory that involves movement and gaps, it has been suggested that, in certain languages, subject relatives are easier to comprehend and process because they have canonical word order; the order of subject and object or agent and patient in subject relatives resembles that found in simple transitive sentences (Bever 1970;Diessel and Tomasello 2005). For example, in SVO languages with head-initial RCs, such as German or English, children will arrive at the right interpretation of the RC when they assign the first NP the agent role and the second NP discourse participants, expressed by pronominal I or you, or other given referents in the immediate context, expressed by 3rd person pronouns.…”

Türkçede İlgi Tümceciklerinin Edinimine Kullanım Temelli bir Yaklaşım

“…Kidd (2011) explains that the poor comprehension scores of children reported in previous experimental studies (Arnon, 2011;Brandt et al, 2009;Diessel &Tomasello, 2005) are due to the nature of the tests. He argues that these studies employed act-out tests where the children were asked to comprehend the RC constructions without appropriate discourse context and the test sentences were unnatural both in form and function.…”

“…Most of the previous studies on the development of RCs have mainly concentrated on European languages such as English, German and French through experimental studies (Diessel & Tomasello, 2005;Hamburger & Crain, 1982;Brandt, Kidd, Lieven & Tomasello 2009) and through naturalistic observational studies (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000;Fox & Thompson, 2007;Jisa & Kern, 1998). Turkish, as a prenominal relative clause language, receives much attention with the late acquisition of relative clauses.…”

The Acquisition of Complex Structures: The Case of Child ESL

“…The development of subordinate clauses has been the focus of much language acquisition research in both first language (L1) (e.g., Diessel & Tomasello, 2005;Kidd & Bavin, 2002;Sheldon, 1974) and second language (L2) contexts (e.g., Doughty, 1991;Eckman, Bell, & Nelson, 1988;Gass, 1979;Izumi, 2003;Pavesi, 1986). However, most of the previous studies are experimental and few observational studies on this issue have been conducted.…”