A review of the literature on children's use of relative clause constructions reveals many contradictory findings. The suggestion is that some studies fail to take into account the two factors of embeddedness (role of complex noun phrase within the sentence) and focus (role of head noun in the relative clause). The experiment reported here attempted to reconcile the disparate findings and exten...

A brief overview on the semantic differences between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses is given. Subsequently differences with regard to information status and focus alternatives are presented. I investigate, in a systematic way, which focus (accent) patterns on relative-clause constructions are (im)possible in which contexts and why this is so. In order to account for the infeli...

This article examines the special processing characteristics of head-final relative clauses. As head-final relative clauses superficially resemble other prenominal modifiers such as adjectivals, stative verbs, and adjunctive/complement clauses, their status as a distinct kind has constantly been challenged. We present existing processing evidence to show that head-final relative clauses should ...

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are more complex than subject-extracted structures. A k...

In surveys of third language acquisition (TLA) research, mixed results demonstrate that there is no consensus among researchers regarding the advantages and/or disadvantages of bilinguality on  TLA.  The  main  concern  of  the  present  study  was,  thus,  to  probe  the  probable  differences between  Persian  monolingual  and  Azeri-Persian  bilingual  learners  of  English  regarding  their...