Continuity in the Adult and Children’s Comprehension of Subject and Object Relative Clauses in French and Italian

Maria Guasti,Julie Franck,Mirta Vernice

doi:10.3390/languages3030024

Abstract

Subject and object relative clauses have been studied from the point of view of language acquisition and adult sentence processing. In the adult sentence processing literature, subject relative clauses (RCs) are read faster than object RCs (e.g., Frauenfelder et al. 1980 for French; King and Kutas 1995 for English; Schriefers et al. 1995 for Dutch). Similarly, children understand and produce subject RCs earlier and with greater accuracy than object RCs in a variety of languages with head-initial relative clauses, as English, Hebrew and Italian. These findings cannot be a coincidence but reflect the fact that what children acquire first is also easier to process by adults. In this article, we support this observation by investigating subject and object RCs in children and adults speaking French and Italian. These languages display subject and object relatives as in (1), but they also have a type of object relative in which the subject is postverbal. We replicate the observation that subject relatives are easier than object and show that object relatives as in (1b), with the embedded subject in preverbal position are easier than those with the embedded subject in postverbal position, both for children and adults. We offer an account of these findings in terms of Fodor and Inoue’s (2000) diagnosis model in light of the fact that acquisition involves processing.

Highlights

Language acquisition and language processing research have generally proceeded separately, in the last 15 years, phenomena studied in the adult psycholinguistic literature have been explored in children to document how children solve ambiguities, whether/how they differ from adults and whether aspects of grammatical development may be due to children’s limited sentence processing abilities
We carried out three experiments aiming at examining how French-speaking children as well as French- and Italian-speaking adults understand and process relative clauses
Our starting points were (i) the generalization that structures that are more difficult to process for adults are mastered later by children (Phillips and Ehrenhofer 2015), and (ii) the findings by Schelstraete and Degand (1998) that French-speaking adults process OVS object relative clauses more than OSV ones

Summary

Introduction

Language acquisition and language processing research have generally proceeded separately, in the last 15 years, phenomena studied in the adult psycholinguistic literature have been explored in children to document how children solve ambiguities, whether/how they differ from adults and whether aspects of grammatical development may be due to children’s limited sentence processing abilities (see Phillips and Ehrenhofer 2015 for a review). One phenomenon that illustrates this trend is subject and object relative clauses. In the adult sentence processing literature, subject relative clauses (RCs), as in (1a), are read faster than object RCs, as in (1b) (e.g., Frauenfelder et al 1980 for French; King and Kutas 1995 for English; Schriefers et al 1995 for Dutch). The boy [that the girl kissed t] went home. In the adult sentence processing literature, subject relative clauses (RCs), as in (1a), are read faster than object RCs, as in (1b) (e.g., Frauenfelder et al 1980 for French; King and Kutas 1995 for English; Schriefers et al 1995 for Dutch). a.

Methods

Results

Conclusion