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 Englishand German-speaking children to repeat six different types of relative clauses. Although English and German relative clauses are structurally very different, the results were s...

Sanghoun Song. 2014. Information Structure of Relative Clauses in English: a Flexible and Computationally Tractable Model. Language and Information 18.2 , 1–29. Relativization is one of the common syntactic operations to merge two different clauses into a single information unit. This operation plays a pivotal role to structuralize multiple clauses cohesively as well as serves to specify the pr...

Broadly speaking, subject relative clauses are easier to understand than object relative clauses (Wanner & Maratsos, 1978, Ford, 1983, Holmes & O'Regan, 1981, among many others). This can be demonstrated by a variety of methods that measure the speed and accuracy with which sentences containing relative clauses are processed. As an example, compare (1a), which contains a subject relative clause...

the present study intended to investigate the processing behavior of 2 groups of l2 learners of english (high and mid in proficiency) and a group of english native speakers on english active and passive reduced relative clauses. three sets of tasks, an offline task, and 2 online tasks were conducted. results revealed that the high-proficiency group’s performance was the same as that of the nati...

This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read...

This study presents results from a sentence completion test that examines the production of finite main clauses and non-finite relative clauses in Turkish agrammatic speech. In main clauses, the verb is finite and all its constituents are in their base positions. In relative clauses, the verb is a participle and the NP undergoes overt movement to an A-bar position. The results show that non-fin...

We report the results of experiments designed to investigate the effects of prosodic boundaries on resolving ambiguous syntactic clause boundaries in Japanese. The head-final, prodrop nature of this language generates abundant syntactic attachment ambiguity for sentences that contain relative clauses. Two types of sentences with differing head nouns modified by relative clauses were examined. S...

This paper examines the development of relative clauses in early child language. It is argued that relative clauses constitute a network of related constructions that children acquire in a piecemeal bottom-up way, starting with relative clauses that are only little different from simple sentences which are gradually extended into more complex grammatical patterns. The acquisition process is dri...