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 ob...

In two self-paced reading experiments, subject relative clauses (e.g., 'the woman who saw the man') were read faster than object relative clauses ('the woman who the man saw') in Japanese. Previous formulations of working-memory factors do not predict the patterns observed. A preference to complete fragments as object relative clauses indicates that ambiguity and expectation are unlikely to exp...

In German, relative clauses can be positioned in-situ or extraposed. A potential factor for the variation might be information density. In this study, this hypothesis is tested with a corpus of 17 th century German funeral sermons. For each referent in the relative clauses and their matrix clauses, the attention state was determined (first calculation). In a second calculation, for each word th...

The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Abstract This paper presents a self-paced reading experiment comparing the processing of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) in supportive contexts in Chinese. It is argued that lack of a consistent pattern in the literature fo...

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition processing, a large body of has shown that object relative (e.g. ‘The boy the girl saw’) are more difficult to process than subject saw girl’). Although there different accounts this finding, memory-based factors argued play role explaining disadvantage. Evidence clause processing comes from ...

A number of different formal analyses of relative clauses have been proposed over the years. For example, the adjunction analysis states that the relative clause is adjoined to the modified noun; the antisymmetry analysis (formulated in Kayne 1994) posits that the complementizer phrase (CP) is the direct complement of the determiner (the determiner being the head of the nominal projection), and...