Children's poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms....

We conducted a large-scale corpus analysis indicating that pronominal object relative clauses are significantly more frequent than pronominal subject relative clauses when the embedded pronoun is personal. This difference was reversed when impersonal pronouns constituted the embedded noun phrase. This pattern of distribution provides a suitable framework for testing the role of experience in se...

A general fact about language is that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Recently, several self-paced reading studies have presented surprising evidence that object relatives in Chinese are easier to process than subject relatives. We carried out three self-paced reading experiments that attempted to replicate these results. Two of our three studies fou...

Sadrzadeh et al (2013) present a compositional distributional analysis of relative clauses in English in terms of the Frobenius algebraic structure of finite dimensional vector spaces. The analysis relies on distinct type assignments and lexical recipes for subject vs object relativisation. The situation for Dutch is different: because of the verb final nature of Dutch, relative clauses are amb...

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subjectand object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the sentence-nouns). A significant on-line interaction was found...

Various studies have reported that subject relative clauses (the boy who likes the woman) are easier to produce and comprehend than object relatives (the boy that the woman likes). To expand this discussion, this study investigates young children’s production of head-final relative clauses in Korean. In particular, it is examined whether Korean children acquire relativization in the order predi...

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...