Object Relative Clauses Research Articles

The Effects of Syntactic Complexity and Presentation Speed on Sentence Comprehension in Age-Related Hearing Loss: Using the RSVP Paradigm

Objectives: Investigate the impact of age-related hearing loss on cognitive decline and sentence comprehension. Examine how syntactic complexity and presentation speed affect sentence comprehension and explore the correlation between working memory and sentence understanding. Methods: Eighteen individuals with age-related hearing loss and eighteen in the control group participated. The set of sentences consists of a total of 40 sentences, with 20 for subject relative clauses and 20 for object relative clauses. These sentences were visually presented using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm, with each sentence displayed at a fast rate (480 msec) or a slow rate (900 msec) per phrase, respectively. The working memory task was also presented visually using the RSVP paradigm. Results: Individuals with age-related hearing loss exhibited significantly lower sentence comprehension than those with normal hearing. This may reflect a potential link between hearing loss and cognitive decline, as sentence comprehension tasks serve as important linguistic indicators for identifying cognitive impairment. The fast rate resulted in lower accuracy compared to the slow rate, indicating an association with age-related delays in information processing speed. Both groups showed a negative correlation between working memory and response time for subject-relative clauses at slower speeds. Thus, as working memory decreases, the response time becomes longer. Conclusion: Using visual presentation methods, this study confirms sentence comprehension and cognitive decline in age-related hearing loss. Furthermore, it holds significance in establishing the clinical basis for language-auditory assessment tools to facilitate the early detection of dementia resulting from age-related hearing loss.

Notes on the acquisition of L2 English intervention structures: a case of Japanese EFL learners

Abstract This paper discusses Japanese-speaking EFL learners’ acquisition of English object relative clauses (ORC), which have intervention (Relativized Minimality) structures. Specifically, we contrast their early understanding of the ORC and the Subject Control constructions with their late understanding of the Subject Raising (seem) construction that exhibits a structural effect of locality on the filler-gap relation. We argue that relativization and the Control structure in Japanese induce hierarchical structures on par with those in English. Therefore, the learners have acquired a way of avoiding intervention during the process of acquiring the ORC and the Control structures in Japanese. L1 grammatical knowledge helps nullify the intervention effect in acquiring the constructions in L2 English. On the other hand, it takes time for them to overcome the effect by learning the seem raising structure with a specific strategy because Japanese does not have a construction similar to it. L1 Japanese critically influences the acquisition of L2 English with respect to the intervention configurations.

The diachronic change of English relativizers: a case study in the State of the Union addresses across two centuries

Abstract Different types of relativizers are used to introduce relative clauses, and the change in the use of relativizers has attracted attention in recent decades. Despite progress in this area, the challenge of extracting relative clauses, especially those with zero relativizers, has limited our understanding of relativizer change. To this end, we investigated the evolving patterns of relativizers in the State of the Union addresses spanning two centuries, employing novel methodologies developed for this purpose. Different from findings of previous studies, our results showed an increase of that and a decrease of which in subject relative clauses, and an increase of zero relativizers in object relative clauses. The change could be attributed to changes in factors concerning text complexity and styles. The faster change rate around 1940s can be explained by factors such as prescriptivism and the transition in speech styles. Methodologically, our study has confirmed dependency parsing as a reliable method for automatic extraction of relative clauses.

Intervention and amelioration effects in the acquisition of Spanish object relative clauses: the role of word order and DOM

Intervention and amelioration effects in the acquisition of Spanish object relative clauses: the role of word order and DOM

Russian Children and Their Relatives: What Can a Free Word Order Language Reveal About the Subject/Object Asymmetry?

ABSTRACT The present study revisits the well-attested phenomenon of Subject/Object Asymmetry in relative clause comprehension by monolingual Russian pre-school children. Additionally, it examines the NP-V and the V-NP word order types when the embedded NP precedes or follows the verb. Both the word orders are grammatical for Russian subject and object relative clauses alike. Object relative clause comprehension difficulty was evidenced across all the age groups. Word order alternation (V-NP vs NP-V) did not significantly affect the accuracy rates. Besides the efficacy of the agent-first strategy, growing morphological knowledge compels children to update their ongoing structural analysis, which results in embedded NP errors. Yet, even at 6 years of age, children do not display word order preferences to go with a particular relative clause type that are found in Russian-speaking adults. Restricted exposure to written texts at pre-school age as well as low validity of word order as a cue to thematic role assignment are discussed as possible reasons for children’s insensitivity to word order manipulation in Russian relative clauses.

The acquisition of object relative clauses in Spanish

The acquisition of object relative clauses in Spanish

An Investigation of Syntactic Impairment in Relative Clauses of a Non-Fluent Aphasic Patient

This paper reports on a study on the typical characterization of syntactic impairment in relative clauses found in a patient diagnosed with non-fluent aphasia or also known as Broca ‘s aphasia at National Stroke Association of Malaysia (NASAM), Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The study adopts the theory of Chomsky’s (1981) Government and Binding Theory that consist of (D)eep Structure and (S)urface Structure as a framework for the description of syntactic impairment and adopts an influential hypothesis by Grodzinsky’s (1990) Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) concerning agrammatism. The sentence structure used in this study is syntactically identical to the base order subject-verb-object (SVO) except for the movement of the object to the beginning of the sentence known as derived order that will result to the formation of object-subject-verb (OSV) in English, and thus enable examination of syntactic movement in agrammatic comprehension. This study involves one patient with non-fluent aphasia, native speaker of Tamil and speaker of English as second language from NASAM, performing a sentence - to-picture matching test. This study reveals the patient’s comprehension of subject relative clauses (SVO structure) are significantly above chance level, but object relative clauses (OSV structure) are at chance level. This study reveals that the score obtained by the patient is within the percentage and performance level (standard norm) proposed by Grodzinsky. These results also show that the non-fluent aphasic patient’s ability to comprehend the relative clauses that involve movement of a noun phrase is impaired.

Bilingual children’s online processing of relative clauses

Abstract Long-distance dependencies such as relative clauses (RCs) are known to be vulnerable in heritage grammars (e.g., Montrul, 2008). Previous studies in RC comprehension have shown that heritage language (HL) children show similar comprehension to monolingual children (Jia & Paradis, 2020), while differential performance has also been found (Kidd et al., 2015). The present study investigates 11–13-year-old monolingual and German-dominant HL children’s real-time parsing strategies in subject relative clause (SRC) and object relative clause (ORC) processing in Greek. We conducted a self-paced listening task in Greek in which we manipulated the type of RC (subject vs. object), and the RC internal word order (canonical vs. scrambled). Our analyses revealed no significant group differences between HL and monolingual children. Both groups of children processed SRCs faster than ORCs on the critical RC verb segment. We also examined if case-marked pre-verbal NPs would facilitate the processing of ORC structures. Although children processed pre-verbal faster than post-verbal NPs, ORC structures with pre-verbal NPs received the lowest scores in the grammaticality judgment task. We discuss these findings on the grounds of Relativized Minimality (Friedmann et al., 2009) and Fodor and Inoue’s (2000) Diagnosis and Repair Model.

Subject‐Object Asymmetries and the Development of Relative Clauses between Late Middle English and Early Modern English

AbstractThis paper presents the results of a corpus study on the Wycliffe Bible and the King James Bible, examining the distribution of the pronouns who(m)/which and the complementiser that in relative clauses with a personal referent. The data indicate that the decisive factor in both periods was the function of the gap (subject vs. non‐subject): wh‐pronouns are preferred in object relative clauses, while that is preferred in subject relative clauses. In addition, the paper argues that the subject/non‐subject distinction was decisive not only regarding the major wh/that distribution but also regarding the who(m)/which distinction. While in the case of the wh/that distinction, a syntactic difference (relative pronoun versus relative complementiser) underlies the attested asymmetry, the pronouns who(m) and which do not differ in their core syntactic properties. The data clearly indicate that both the wh‐strategy in general and the pronoun who(m) in particular started to spread from the lower functions of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, whereby the spread of who(m) was one step behind the general spread of the wh‐strategy. The findings thus suggest that asymmetries along the lines of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy are not necessarily paired up with syntactic asymmetries.

A comparison of learning and retention of a syntactic construction between Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD in a priming task

Procedural circuit Deficit Hypothesis (PDH) of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) predicts problems with learning and retention of grammar. Twenty 7- to 9-year-old Cantonese-speaking children with DLD and their typically developing (TD) age peers participated in a syntactic priming task that was given in two sessions one week apart. Production of Indirect Object Relative Clause (IORC) was tested using a probe test before and after the priming task, and one week later. The study involved two cycles of learning and retention, and two levels of prior knowledge. Bayesian linear mixed effects modelling was used for data analysis. Children with DLD learned, and possibly retained, IORC less well than TD children after age, working memory and general grammatical knowledge were controlled for. No interaction effects were significant, meaning that cycle and prior knowledge affected both groups similarly in learning and retention. Results were discussed in relation to PDH and the Complementary Learning Systems Theory.

Capturing individual differences in sentence processing: How reliable is the self-paced reading task?

Advances in research on language processing have originally come from group-level comparisons, but there is now a growing interest in individual differences. To investigate individual differences, tasks that have shown robust group-level differences are often used with the implicit assumption that they will also be reliable when used as an individual differences measure. Here, we examined whether one of the primary tasks used in psycholinguistic research on language processing, the self-paced reading task, can reliably measure individual differences in relative clause processing. We replicated the well-established effects of relative clauses at the group level, with object relative clauses being more difficult to process than subject relative clauses. However, when using difference scores, the reliability of the size of the relative clause effect was close to zero because the self-paced reading times for the different relative clause types were highly correlated within individuals. Nonetheless, we found that the self-paced reading task can be used to reliably capture individual differences in overall reading speed as well as key sentence regions when the two types of relative clause sentences are considered separately. Our results indicate that both the reliability and validity of different sentence regions need to be assessed to determine whether and when self-paced reading can be used to examine individual differences in language processing.

How semantics works in Chinese relative clause processing: insights from eye tracking.

Recent years have witnessed much research on semantic analysis and syntactic anatomy in ordinary language processing. However, it is still a matter of considerable debate about when and how the semantic integration of single word meanings works and interacts with syntax during on-line comprehension. This study, in an eye-tracking paradigm, took 38 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese as the participants and took Chinese relative clauses as stimuli to figure out the functions of semantics by investigating the conditioning semantic factors influencing and governing the word order variation of Chinese relative clauses during different processing stages. Accordingly, this study manipulated two syntactic variables, i.e., relative clause type and the position of the numeral-classifier sequence (NCL) in the relative clause, as well as a semantic variable, i.e., the abstractness of the head noun that the relative clause modified. Specifically, the study addressed two questions: (1) when semantics is activated and interacts with syntax and (2) how semantics affects syntax during the time course of Chinese relative clause processing. The results indicated that: (1) Semantics was activated and interacted with syntax during the early and late processing stages of Chinese relative clauses, which challenged the sequential order of syntactic and semantic processes, and supported the claims of the Concurrent Processing Model. (2) The syntactic order of the Chinese relative clause was affected by the semantic information of the head noun that the clause modified. Object-extraction relative clauses (ORCs) had a conjunction preference for the order "an object relative clause preceding the numeral-classifier sequence and the head noun." Instead, the subject-extraction relative clause (SRC) which modified a concrete noun (CN) had a co-occurrence preference for the order "numeral-classifier sequence preceding the subject relative clause and the head noun," while the subject-extraction relative clause which modified an abstract noun (AN) had a co-occurrence preference for the order "subject relative clause preceding the numeral-classifier sequence and the head noun." The findings of this study were evaluated in light of the perspectives of truth value semantics of the syntactic components, the semantic compatibility of numeral-classifier sequence and its modified noun as well as the discourse functions of outer modifier nominals and inner modifier nominals.

The production of relative clauses in Italian-speaking children with DLD

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have been shown to struggle with the acquisition of complex structures requiring structural embedding and movement of a sentential element from its original position. This study examines the production of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) by Italian children, investigating whether: i) seven-year-old children with DLD are impaired in embedding or movement operations; ii) specific factors, such as animacy of the arguments, affect the production of sentences with movement and embedding, iii) the linguistic profile of children with DLD is qualitatively different from that of typically developing (TD) children. We elicited the production of RCs with animate and inanimate arguments in 12 Italian-speaking children with DLD (mean age = 7;2) and in two TD control groups: age matched (AM) and language matched (LM). Children with DLD produced fewer RCs than either control group and made different errors, showing a slightly different developmental path. Animacy mismatch did not improve RC production in any group. Results suggest that seven-year-old children with DLD are in a transitional stage: they can use embedding but still have difficulties with movement operations, especially in object RCs. This indicates that the language competence of children with DLD improves with age, but long-distance dependencies continue to be challenging.

Explicit instruction improves the comprehension of Spanish object relatives by young monolingual children

Abstract The present study assessed the comprehension of Spanish object relative (OR) clauses by 6- and 7-year-old children before and after a brief training session targeting the structural differences between ORs and subject relatives. In addition, we investigated the potential relationships between OR comprehension on the one hand and vocabulary size and non-verbal intelligence quotient (IQ) on the other. Comprehension of ORs was very poor at the pre-test but improved considerably after training. Further improvement was observed between the immediate post-test and a delayed post-test, suggesting that the knowledge acquired during training had been integrated into the children’s developing linguistic systems. Non-verbal IQ and vocabulary were not found to predict comprehension accuracy. We take these results to suggest that children’s difficulties with ORs are better explained by their experience with this construction than by maturational factors and that explicit contrast and feedback can bolster grammatical development in L1 acquisition.

Budding the tree. Towards a theory of structure removal

This paper presents a theory of structure removal based on the operation of Bud. Bud is defined as a variant of External Merge. While External Merge always targets the root of a syntactic object, Bud targets a lower projection. The operation is constrained by minimality and is used to provide a novel account to analytic passive, causative constructions in Italian and infinitival constructions like raising predicates. It also offers an elegant way to account for structure pruning in cases of language disorder, root infinitives in child speech and preference for passive plus subject relativization over object relative clauses.

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

PurposeRelative 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.MethodRelative 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.ResultsObject 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.ConclusionThe 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.

The Unexpected Lightness of the Main Verb: An Eye-Tracking Study on Relative Clauses and Trace Reactivation

A few studies on relative-clause processing report an unexpected facilitatory effect on the matrix verb that follows an Object Relative (ORC) clause (e.g. Staub, Dillon and Clifton jr. 2017). In this study we present the results of a novel eye-tracking experiment that replicated this effect on Italian. The advantage of ORCs is discussed under the hypothesis that subject-verb agreement in the matrix benefits from a general trace-reactivation mechanisms, subsumed from activation-based retrieval models (Lewis and Vasishth 2005).

Online revision process in clause-boundary garden-path sentences.

A long-standing question in sentence processing research concerns the online parsing process in clause-boundary garden-path sentences, such as After Mary dressed John bathed. In this sentence, "John" must be parsed as the matrix subject DP but can be locally analysed as the object of the embedded verb. There is considerable evidence that the parser misanalyses these garden-path sentences. However, the controversy lies in whether the parser revises them during the online parsing process. The present study investigated this revision process through two self-paced reading experiments utilising grammatical constraints on reflexives and subject or object relative clauses embedded within the locally ambiguous DP. The results provided evidence of revision when a subject relative clause was embedded but not when an object relative clause was embedded. These findings suggest that the parser assigns grammatical structures that correspond to input strings during the revision of clause-boundary ambiguities but that object relative clauses affect the online revision process.

Resumption optionality in direct object relative clauses in modern standard Arabic

The resumption phenomenon has attracted the attention of linguists within different frameworks and in various languages. However, this phenomenon has received limited attention in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), especially in relation to Direct Object Relative Clauses (DORCs). There have been a few discussions of DORCs and this disregard can be attributed to a fundamental reason which is resumption optionality in this construction in particular. By and large, the interpretation of resumptive pronouns is usually determined by competition with gaps. However, based on the structural facts in MSA (i.e. resumptive pronouns behavior in island constraints) and discussion about optional and obligatory resumptive pronouns, we argue that the resumption strategy is the only method used to generate Direct Object Relative Clauses. Therefore, resumptive pronouns are integral part of the syntactic derivation and could be either phonologically realized or null. A resumptive pronoun, we assume, is a spell-out trace of the moved element. Moreover, a clear description and analysis of DORCs, both definite and indefinite structures (i.e. head DPs with and without the definite article ʔal), will be presented by utilizing the Minimalist Program and the Head Raising Analysis . The mutual influence of the presence and absence of the resumptive pronouns on other elements in the structure (i.e. Head DP and relative marker “ʔallaði”) will be explored as well.

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.