Definitions that children provide can be a valuable measure of their syntax, and specifically, of their ability to produce relative-clauses. This research explored the acquisition of subject-, object-, and indirect-object-relative clauses in 121 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3;5-8;6. The children were asked to define 14 nouns, and their responses were collected and analyzed for various syntacti...

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive...

There is still much debate about the nature of the experiential and maturational changes that take place during childhood to bring about the sophisticated language abilities of an adult. The present study investigated text exposure as a possible source of linguistic experience that plays a role in the development of adult-like language abilities. Corpus analyses of object and passive relative c...

Relative clauses have been implicated alternately as a strength and a weakness in the language of people with Williams Syndrome (WS). To clarify the facts, an elicited production test was administered to 10 people with WS (age 10 16 years), 10 typically developing children (age 4 7 years), and 12 typically developing adults. Nearly every WS participant successfully produced both subject gap (SG...

Persian has a case system whereby specific direct objects are marked with the enclitic را =rā. However, spoken language presents greater degree of flexibility regard to =rā marking, espe ...

in this paper, we examine the treatment of persian relative clauses in role and reference grammar. rrg is a structural-functional theory which has studied the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface in human language systems. the main objectives of this article, on the one hand, are to elucidate syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of farsi relative clauses, and on the other hand, to asse...

Although both sentences in (1) and (2) contain a displaced element (e.g. the cat), the two structures differ as to the position of the gap inside the relative clause. In subject relative clauses such as (1), the position which the filler moves from is the syntactic subject of the relative clause (e.g. ‘the cat chases the mouse’). By contrast, in object relative clauses like (2), the filler is m...