Journal Article

A New Look at the Acquisition of Relative Clauses

Diessel, Holger, Tomasello, Michael

2005

Overview

This study reconsiders the acquisition of relative clauses based on data from two sentence-repetition tasks. Using materials modeled on the relative constructions of spontaneous child speech, we asked four-year-old English- and German-speaking children to repeat six different types of relative clauses. Although English and German relative clauses are structurally very different, the results were similar across studies: intransitive subject relatives caused fewer errors than transitive subject relatives and direct object relatives, which in turn caused fewer errors than indirect object relatives and oblique relatives; finally, genitive relatives caused by far the most problems. Challenging previous analyses in which the acquisition of relative clauses has been explained by the varying distance between filler and gap, we propose a multifactorial analysis in which the acquisition process is determined primarily by the similarity between the various types of relative clauses and their relationship to simple sentences.

• Publisher: Linguistic Society of America
• Subject: Acquisition / Child Language / Child language. Acquisition and development / Children / Children & youth / Comparative analysis / English / English language / Errors / German / German language / Grammar / Grammatical case / Grammatical constructions / Grammatical subject / Heuristics / Language / Language Acquisition / Language change / Linguistics / Order of Acquisition / Production and comprehension processes / Psycholinguistics / Psychology of language / Referents / Regression analysis / Relative Clauses / Relative pronouns / Repetition / Sentence Structure / Sentences / Speech / Spontaneous speech / Syntactic Processing / Syntactics