CUNY Relative clauses that children understand : NP type effects on child processing

Relative clauses that children understand: NP type effects on child processing Inbal Arnon Relative clauses (RCs) have been studied extensively in language acquisition and adult processing. Studies show that both children and adults find object relatives harder than subject relatives [1, 2]. Despite the similar pattern, adult difficulty is taken to reflect the increased processing demands of object relatives [1] while child difficulty is often interpreted as evidence for children's lack of adult-like knowledge of the structure, attributed to under-developed syntax [2] or to the use of non-adult processing heuristics which are abandoned as the parser develops [3]. In this paper, I suggest that children's difficulty reflects similarity between the child and the adult parser: children display adult-like processing preferences. The study focuses on the effect of the NP type appearing inside the relative clause. This factor was shown to influence adult processing: adult difficulty with object relatives is reduced when the embedded NP is a pronoun rather than a Lexical NP [4]. Two experiments demonstrate the influence of this factor on child performance. Together, the experiments show that just like adults children are better at comprehending what they (a) hear more frequently and (b) requires less processing resources. Furthermore, the results suggest that previous assessments of child performance have underestimated children's knowledge by testing them on relative clauses that are especially taxing even for adults.