Acquisition Of Relative Clauses Research Articles

Examining Cross-linguistic Influence of Japanese Word Order: An Eye-Tracking Study on L2 English Learners’ Text Comprehension

Cross-linguistic influence is a systematic and unavoidable feature of language learning. This study aimed to investigate whether prepositive word order in Japanese noun clauses can serve as a cross-linguistic influence element in the acquisition of relative clauses (a form of a postpositive modifier) in English. To test this hypothesis, this study conducted an eye-tracking experiment with native Japanese speakers and showed the following results statistically. First, Japanese participants generally paid more attention to modifier clauses than the noun phrases they modified when reading English sentences with relative clauses. Second, when interpreting accusative relative clauses, longer fixations were observed both in the modifier clauses and in the antecedents, likely due to their complexity for Japanese L2 learners of English, as evidenced by the lowest accuracy rate. Finally, and most notably, the findings revealed that the participants who had not fully acquired the relative clause construction focused more on the left side of the relative pronoun than those who had. This tendency was most prominent when interpreting subjective relative clauses, a result that supports the hypothesis that prepositive L1 modifiers could be a CLI element in the acquisition of English postpositive modifiers.

On the universality of the subject preference in the acquisition of relative clauses across languages

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this meta-analysis follows an established and rigorous scientific method to test the generalizability of the subject preference in RC acquisition by evaluating the collective evidence. While the results show a significant crosslinguistic subject preference, there is a large amount of heterogeneity in the data. The manifestation of this subject preference may not be uniform across languages, depending on typological properties such as language headedness, RC headedness, and main clause similarity. The true impact of these features, however, requires research on more typologically diverse languages.

The Effects of the Garden Path Technique on Chinese L2 Learners’ Acquisition of Relative Clauses

The Effects of the Garden Path Technique on Chinese L2 Learners’ Acquisition of Relative Clauses

The Acquisition of Relative Clauses in Autism: The Role of Executive Functions and Language.

Relative clauses present a well-known processing asymmetry between object-extracted and subject-extracted dependencies across both typical and atypical populations. The present study aimed at exploring the comprehension of object and subject relative clauses as conceptualized by the Relativized Minimality framework in autistic children and in a group of age- and IQ-matched typically-developing children. The study also explored the way performance in relative clauses would be affected by the children's language and executive function skills. Relative clause comprehension was tested through a sentence-picture matching task and language was tested with a receptive vocabulary task. Executive functions were assessed through backward digit recall and a Flanker test. Object relative clauses were harder to parse for both groups than subject relatives, while number mismatch between the moved object Noun Phrase and the intervening subject Noun Phrase in object relatives boosted both groups' performances. Typically-developing children's performance in object relatives was predicted by both language and executive functions, while autistic children failed to use language and did not systematically draw on their executive functions in object relative clause comprehension. The findings suggest that relative clause processing in autism follows a normal developmental trajectory, and that difficulty with parsing object relative clauses stems from reduced language and executive functions rather than deficits in the children's morphosyntactic skills.

Acquisition of English relative clauses by native speakers of Kurdish Sorani

AbstractThe present study investigates several linguistic factors that might be determinants of differences in the ease of acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in L2 contexts, using the acquisition of English relative clauses by Kurdish Sorani native speakers. The analysis of 1440 subject and object RCs formed by Kurdish Sorani-speaking learners of English in a sentence combination task and a sentence translation task indicates that the syntactic functions of the noun phrase (NP) relativized in the RC, the position of the RC in the matrix clause (whether centre- or right-embedded), and the properties of RCs in L1 affect the acquisition and the formation of RCs in L2. The study also provides evidence that the syntactic functions of the relativized NP in the matrix clause, and the consistency/inconsistency of word orders in L1 and L2 do not influence the acquisition of RCs in L2.

Accessibility hierarchy and acquisition of English relative clauses by Urdu EFL learners

Accessibility hierarchy and acquisition of English relative clauses by Urdu EFL learners

A study on acquisition of relative clauses by Korean learners based on the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy(NPAH)

A study on acquisition of relative clauses by Korean learners based on the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy(NPAH)

Meaningful Drills and Contextualized Reading Passages to Understand Relative Clauses

The current study tries to test the assumption that the use of meaningful drills and contextualized reading comprehension passages lead to better understanding of relative clauses. The study is based on the idea that meaning and contexts are necessary for learning to take place. It also aims to empirically test the effect of meaningful drills proposed by Christina Paulston on the acquisition of relative clauses. A sample of (30) first year undergraduate students of English took part in this study. The participants were divided equally into experimental and control group. The sample performances were matched based on their scores in the pre and posttest. After doing the pretest the experimental students received a short handout with relative clauses presented in short reading passages to read for themselves. Students of the experimental group had to identify and discover for themselves the occurrences of relative clauses in the reading passages. The reading passages are followed by meaningful drills on relative clauses. Three weeks later, the students in both groups took a posttest on relative clauses. Based on the tests results the authors have concluded that inserting context and meaning leads to better understanding of the grammar pattern being investigated.

Competing factors in SLA: how the CASP model of SLA explains the acquisition of English restrictive relative clauses by native speakers of Arabic and Korean

Abstract The Complex Adaptive Systems Principles (CASP) model of SLA claims that L1 transfer results when language processing effort is minimized. This claim was investigated by a self-paced on-line sentence judgment task in which L1 Arabic and Korean speakers and a control group of L1 English speakers read and judged English subject, direct object, and oblique relative clauses (RCs) in gapped and resumptive pronoun (RP) conditions. It was hypothesized that L1 influence would cause the Arabic speakers to accept English RCs with RPs more frequently than Korean speakers because RPs are acceptable in Arabic direct object and oblique RCs, whereas Korean bans RPs in these RC types. It was also hypothesized that the L2 English speakers would accept RPs more often than the L1 English speakers because RPs would ease L2 sentence processing. As predicted, L1 Arabic speakers accepted RPs more frequently than L1 Korean speakers, a transfer effect, and both L2 English groups accepted RPs more frequently than L1 English speakers, a processing effect. The results thus support the CASP model’s claim that L1 transfer is conditioned by language processing and other complex SLA processes that interact with one another.

Testing the Interpretability Hypothesis: Evidence from acceptability judgments of relative clauses by Persian and French learners of L2 English

Many studies have explored the second language (L2) acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and whether L2 speakers transfer a resumptive strategy from first language (L1) to L2. While evidence seems to suggest that there are significant L1–L2 differences in the processing of RCs, relatively little is known about the source of non-target-like L2 behaviour. The present study investigates the grammatical acceptability of different RC types in L2 English and whether reliance on a resumptive strategy is a syntactic or processing issue. The participants included 71 L1-Persian L2-English, 52 L1-French L2-English, and 44 native English speakers, who completed a proficiency c-test, a grammaticality judgment task, and a reading span working memory (WM) task. Unlike French, which is similar to English in the syntactic derivation of RCs, Persian is a structurally wh-in-situ language that syntactically allows resumption in direct object and object-of-preposition RCs. The results showed that unlike L1-French speakers, L1-Persian speakers were more likely to accept resumptive pronouns in L2-English RCs; however, both L1 and L2 groups overwhelmingly preferred a gap over a resumptive strategy. The results suggest that given sufficiently high proficiency and long immersion experience, L2 speakers can match native speakers in terms of RC syntactic representations, suggesting that the issue faced by learners is a processing issue rather a representational one as suggested by the Interpretability Hypothesis.

어린이 영어 모국어 화자의 관계절 습득과 통사적 특성에 관한 연구

The purpose of this study is to investigate the early language acquisition of relative clauses and the internal syntactic properties of native English - speaking children from the perspective of Minimalist Program. The methods of this study are based on Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2008) and Theory of Parameter (Chomsky 1981, Hyams 1986, 2011, Rizzi 1990). Early relative clauses differ from the adult grammar, in two respects: first, pied - piping in relative clauses is absent. Children produce relatives with preposition stranding, an option available in their target language. Radford (2004) suggested that relative that in child relative clauses is a relative clause complementizer rather than a relative pronoun. The second feature of early relative clauses is the use of resumptive pronouns. English - speaking children accepted resumptive pronouns at a significantly higher rate than adults in all contexts for which gaps were grammatical (McKee and McDaniel 2001). In this study, the properties of relative clauses in child language reflect the process of developing language faculty.

Cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of relative clauses by Norwegian learners of English

This paper reports on an exploratory study of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of relative clauses by young Norwegian learners of English, comparing L1 Norwegian and L2 English material from the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) Corpus to L1 English material from the GiG (Growth in Grammar) Corpus. Previous reports of cross-linguistic influence in this domain have usually involved language pairs that have very different relativization strategies. This study investigates whether similarities between relative clause systems may lead to more subtle effects in the choice of relativizer, the type of head nominal, the syntactic function of the relativized item, the extent of relativization from embedded clauses and the use of relative clauses in special constructions such as existentials and clefts. Although the material is limited, the study found traces of the Norwegian system in the learners L2 English, signalling that this is an area worth further investigation. The learners struggled with the choice between who and which, but used that/zero in a very similar way to their L1 English peers. The L2 English group also had slightly higher frequencies of relative clauses belonging to existentials and clefts, and where the relativized item stemmed from a further embedded clause. These results are consistent with a usage-based theory of second language acquisition, where learners are assumed to transfer features of constructions from their L1 when they are similar enough for them to make a cross-linguistic identification.

The role of resumption in the acquisition of European Portuguese prepositional relative clauses by Chinese learners

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the target language). Results of an oral production task and two online acceptability judgment tasks indicated that resumption does not transfer from the native language, and that Chinese learners of European Portuguese employ movement structures to produce and process relative clauses. Additionally, results showed that resumptive pronouns do not rescue or ameliorate ungrammatical extractions from islands, contrary to what is traditionally assumed in grammatical theory. This finding was kept constant across participants, native and non-native. Overall, we conclude that second language speakers are able to select and reassemble movement features in their non-native language and use similar processing mechanisms as native speakers to analyse island configurations.

핵심명사의 통사적 위치가 한국인 학습자의 중국어 주격/목적격 관계절 처리에 미치는 영향

This study examines the acquisition situation of Chinese relative clause phrases by Korean learners through a self-paced reading task. This study aims to analyze three parts. First, The cognitive processing characteristics of Korean learners of different Chinese level groups when they process and comprehend Chinese subjective and objective relative clauses. Second, the effect of the syntactic position of head nouns on the cognitive processing of Chinese subjective and objective relative clauses. Third, the universal applicability of the representative second language relative clause acquisition theory hypothesis. In this study, two-way ANOVA was performed by dividing the within-subject of the experiment into different relative clause syntax types and between-subjects into a high-level group and a low-level group. The results showed that there were some differences between the high-level group and the lower-level group in the processing of Chinese subjective-objective relative clause sentences. These differences appeared in the reaction times of the experiments. The reaction time for each experimental sentence in the low-level group was much longer than that in the high-level group. In addition, the low-level group exhibited cognitive information processing characteristics that were affected by canonical word order, which is “NVN”, and exhibited the “garden path effect” when processing relative clauses. However, the high-level group showed a pattern of processing sentences relying on the “filler-gap dependencies”clue. Therefore it was found that as the learner’s second language level improved, the dependence on syntactic information increased when gradually acquiring procedural knowledge and understanding sentences. In addition, through the analysis of related data, it was found that the low-level group was less affected by the syntactic positional factors of the head noun, and there was no preference between the Chinese subjective relative clause and the objective relative clause. However, the high-level group showed the processing advantage of SRC (subjective relative clause) located in the subject position of the main clause. The results support the “frequency hypothesis”, “word order typicality hypothesis”, “structural distance hypothesis”, and the “integrated competition model,” consistent with the existing second language acquistion theories.

The Acquisition of Arabic and English Relative Clauses by L2 English and Arabic Learners

This study explored the acquisition of Arabic and English relative clauses by L2 English and Arabic learners. It examined the extent to which the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) (Keenan and Comrie 1977) and the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) (Eckman 1977) account for the acquisition of English and Arabic relative pronouns by English and Arabic L2 learners. Twenty Arabic-speaking learners of English and twenty English-speaking learners of Arabic were selected. To this end, four different tasks were used in this regard, namely the Sentence Combination task, the Multiple-Choice task, the Picture Description task, and the Grammaticality Judgement task. The results of this study showed that Arabic learners of English were able to comprehend and produce relative pronouns successfully. However, their performance was found to be affected by the system of relative pronouns of Arabic. For example, they were found better in producing who than whom. Additionally, the study found that the performance of Arabic learners of English was influenced by the type of the task (i.e., Sentence Combination Task is harder than the Multiple-Choice Task). On the other hand, the English-speaking learners of Arabic (i.e., the L2 Arabic group) produced and comprehended the Arabic relative pronouns easily despite their L1 language interference. The overall results showed that the NPAH and the MDH were able to predict the mistakes made by L2 learners of Arabic and English.

Factors affecting English-speaking learners’ acquisition of Chinese relative clauses with demonstrative classifier phrases

Abstract The current empirical research aimed to investigate native English-speaking learners’ acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by conducting two studies. Study I explored the participants’ performance on gapped and gapless relative clauses (RCs) and their interpretation of demonstrative classifier (DCL)-relative clauses. Study II further investigated the participants’ interpretation of DCL-first and DCL-second RCs and discussed contextual effect. Different tasks were designed in the two studies: a sentence-unscrambling (SU) task and an acceptability judgement (AJ) task in Study I; and an interpretation (IT) task in Study II. A total of 20 L2 learners and 20 native speakers of Mandarin participated in our research. The overall results obtained from Study I revealed that gapped RCs were easier to produce and accept than gapless RCs, and learner performance was influenced by DCL position. Moreover, the L2 learners’ L1 knowledge was found to affect their production, but the task effect was not significant. In Study II, DCL-first RCs were found to be as difficult as DCL-second RCs for the L2 learners to interpret. The non-restrictive and restrictive interpretations of DCL-first RCs were found to be much more comprehensible. Finally, the L2 learners’ interpretation of RCs having DCL phrases in different positions showed a tendency of a contextual effect.

The acquisition and use of relative clauses in Turkish-learning children's conversational interactions: a cross-linguistic approach - CORRIGENDUM.

The acquisition and use of relative clauses in Turkish-learning children's conversational interactions: a cross-linguistic approach - CORRIGENDUM.

The acquisition of relative clauses by Spanish-Basque learners of L3 English: does dominance play a role?

Abstract Several studies in the area of third language acquisition (L3A) have considered various factors influencing this process, but the effect of language dominance has not been thoroughly examined. The main goal of this study is to investigate whether the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in L3 English is influenced by language internal factors, such as the syntactic features of the target language, or by external factors in the form of cross-linguistic influence (CLI). A total of 90 participants (40 Spanish-dominant, 40 Basque-dominant, 10 L1 Spanish-L2 English) and 10 native speakers of English completed a production and a comprehension task. Findings show that the L3 learners’ production of RCs seems to be driven by language internal factors, whereas their comprehension appears to be influenced by their previously acquired languages, mainly by Spanish. It is concluded that neither language dominance nor other traditionally considered factors play a determinant role in the acquisition of RCs in L3 English by these participants.

İKİNCİ DİLİ ÖĞRENEN YETİŞKİNLERİN ÖZNE-NESNE KONUMUNDAKİ SIFAT CÜMLECİKLERİNİ EDİNİMİ

Studies on the acquisition, production and comprehension of relative clauses have been increasing dramatically in recent decades. Various models have been proposed to explain the mechanism and dynamics of relative clauses. The relative complex nature of relative clauses has been challenging linguists and cognitive scientists. However, one of the commonalities in these models is that object relative clauses are harder to process, comprehend and produce than subject relative clauses. This study aimed to focus on the adult learners’ acquisition of relative clauses. Therefore, four tasks were developed to elicit the data regarding the production and comprehension of subject-object relative clauses. Hamilton’s subject-object hypothesis was tested. Five international participants learning Turkish and seven Turkish individuals learning English were involved in the study. The results show that all of the participants produced and comprehended subject relative clauses more easily than object relative clauses. The findings of the study support those of the related literature in that object relative clauses are harder to process, produce and comprehend.

The subject advantage in relative clauses: A review

The question of whether there exists a universal subject preference in relativization has stimulated research in a wide range of languages and across different domains, yielding an extensive body of literature in relative clause acquisition and processing. In this article, we aim at consolidating the efforts of existing research in order to inform further exploration of the universality of the subject preference with a comprehensive analysis of relevant work (including journal articles on empirical studies, dissertations, and conference proceedings). We present an overview of the proposals regarding the source(s) of the subject-object asymmetry from a cross-linguistic perspective and discuss commonly used methodologies in this research area, and we survey the research on relative clause processing and acquisition of different linguistic communities, including native speakers, second language learners, clinical populations, and heritage speakers.