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...

It is widely believed that agrammatic aphasics have lost the ability to assign complete syntactic representations. This view stems from indications that agrammatics often fail to comprehend complex syntactic structures, as for example, some types of relative clauses. The present study presents an alternative account. Comprehension by Serbo-Croatian-speaking agrammatic aphasics was tested on fou...

Relative clauses containing subject relative-pronouns are the prevalent type both across languages and in conversation, accounting for 65% of relative clauses in the American National Corpus (Reali and Christiansen 2007). This fact appears attributable to processing constraints, as per Hawkins 1999, 2004: subject extractions are the most local filler-gap dependency and therefore impose the leas...

The difference between restrictive and appositive relativization is usually represented in syntax as complementation versus adjunction with respect to the antecedent noun. Instead I propose that an appositive relative clause (ARC) is coordinated with its antecedent. This approach avoids problems that come with the adjunction analysis, and it predicts some interesting facts. First consider the s...