Comprehension of Subject and Object Relative Clauses in a Trilingual Acquisition Context

Comprehension of Subject and Object Relative Clauses in a Trilingual Acquisition Context

Chinese relative clauses (RCs) have word order properties that are distinctly rare across languages of the world; such properties provide a good testing ground to tease apart predictions regarding the relative complexity of subject and object RCs in acquisition and processing. This study considers these special word order properties in a multilingual acquisition context, examining how Cantonese...

Subject/Object Asymmetry in the Comprehension of English Relative Clauses by Japanese Learners of English

The effect of Code switching on the Acquisition of Object Relative Clauses by Iranian EFL Learners

This study attempted to investigate the impact of teacher’s code-switching on the acquisition of a problematic grammatical structure, namely, object relative clauses, by intermediate EFL learners. Moreover, a secondary objective of the study was to determine the EFL learners’ attitudes and opinions regarding the effectiveness of teacher’s code-switching in their learning of a specific aspect of...

Effects of local and global context on processing sentences with subject and object relative clauses.

An eye tracking study investigated the effects of local and global discourse context on the processing of subject and object relative clauses, whereby the contexts favored either a subject relative clause interpretation or an object relative clause interpretation. The fixation data replicated previous studies showing that object relative clause sentences were more difficult to process than subj...

Children's comprehension of relative clauses.

A review of the literature on children's use of relative clause constructions reveals many contradictory findings. The suggestion is that some studies fail to take into account the two factors of embeddedness (role of complex noun phrase within the sentence) and focus (role of head noun in the relative clause). The experiment reported here attempted to reconcile the disparate findings and exten...