Stratégies de compréhension de phrases doublement enchâssées par relativisation

Abstract

Summary For the study of the syntactic strategies involved in the processing of complex sentences, adults and 12 year old children are given a sentence comprehension task using doubly embedded relative clauses. In order to prevent the use of pragmatic or semantic strategies, ail sentences are reversible. They are divided into eight different types obtained from the crossing of 3 two-modality factors according to the function, in each kernel sentence, of coreferential noun phrases. Four embedding structures are thus defined. The data show that while the NVN sequence strategy parallels the most obvious characteristics of speakers' performance, it provides only a gross description of these characteristics. The analysis of both main effects and interactions shows (a) that the parallel function strategy keeps playing an important part, (b) that the main difficulty with the processing resides in the double function status of the first subordinate clause. It looks as though the speaker, notwithstanding the possible impeding of an interruption, were trying first to recognize the main clause which constitutes the sentence pivot.