Comprehension Of Relative Clauses Research Articles

Disambiguating Information and Memory Resources in Children’s Processing of Italian Relative Clauses

We investigated the role of number agreement on verb and of animacy in the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in 51 monolingual Italian-speaking children, mean age 9:33, tested through a self-paced listening experiment with a final comprehension question. A digit span test and a listening span test were also administered to examine the role of memory in comprehension. Subject relative clauses were easier to comprehend than object relative clauses; animacy of the relative clause head improved comprehension of object relative clauses; memory, as measured by the digit span test, modulates comprehension of object relative clauses, both with animate and inanimate heads, as shown in response accuracy. Although all children process number agreement morphology on the verb, only some perform a correct reanalysis, as shown by the accuracy measures.We argue that number agreement disambiguation is particularly taxing for children, as it provides a negative symptom in the sense of Fodor and Inoue (J Psycholinguist Res 29(1):25–36, 2000)and reanalysis requires them to hold two dependencies in memory.

The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several referents) met the pragmatic assumptions of relativization. Comprehension of the main and relative clauses of centre-embedded and right-branching structures was compared for each context. Pragmatically appropriate contexts exerted a positive effect on relative clause comprehension, but children with higher memory spans demonstrated a further benefit for main clauses. Comprehension for centre-embedded main clauses was found to be very poor, independently of either context or memory span. The results suggest that children have access to adult-like linguistic processing mechanisms, and that sensitivity to extralinguistic cues is evident in young children and develops as cognitive capacity increases.

Processing Italian Relative Clauses: Working Memory Span and Word Order Effects on RTs

ABSTRACT In this study, the authors aim to clarify whether the subject–object asymmetry in relative clause comprehension is due to the use of parsing strategies (Active Filler Theory) or to a greater memory load generated by object sentences. Two experiments investigate how individual differences in working memory span may influence the reading times of relative sentences in Italian, a language characterized by a flexible structure. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that object extraction is more complex than subject extraction when sentences have a canonical structure. Furthermore, low-span participants have particular difficulties with object relative sentence comprehension. The results of Experiment 2 show that subject-relative clauses with uncanonical structures are more complex to understand than object-relative clauses, and low-span participants have more difficulties than high-span participants in elaborating both subject and object relative clauses. These data seem to be coherent with the Active Filler Theory.

Comprehension and production of movement-derived sentences by Russian speakers with agrammatic aphasia

This study explored the way Russian speakers with agrammatism understand and repeat movement-derived sentences, and examined whether they use morpho-syntactic cues to assist comprehension. The comprehension of three Russian-speaking individuals with agrammatism was tested, and their performance was compared to 15 matched control participants. In addition, the repetition ability of one of the participants was assessed. The study included topicalization structures, relative clauses, and SVO sentences. The individuals with agrammatism performed at chance level on topicalization structures and object relative clauses, whereas their comprehension of SVO sentences and subject relatives was significantly better and above chance. Their comprehension of topicalization structures was poor although all sentences included morphological cues of case marking on the topicalized object and on the subject. Case and gender morphology on the relative pronoun did not lead to better comprehension of object relative clauses compared to relative clauses in which gender inflection could not be used as a cue for interpretation. The repetition task indicated a considerable difficulty in repetition of sentences that include syntactic movement to high nodes of the syntactic tree.

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

In numerous comprehension studies, across different languages, children have performed worse on object relatives (e.g., the dog that the cat chased) than on subject relatives (e.g., the dog that chased the cat). One possible reason for this is that the test sentences did not exactly match the kinds of object relatives that children typically experience. Adults and children usually hear and produce object relatives with inanimate heads and pronominal subjects (e.g., the car that we bought last year) (cf. Kidd et al., Language and Cognitive Processes 22: 860–897, 2007). We tested young 3-year old German- and English-speaking children with a referential selection task. Children from both language groups performed best in the condition where the experimenter described inanimate referents with object relatives that contained pronominal subjects (e.g., Can you give me the sweater that he bought?). Importantly, when the object relatives met the constraints identified in spoken discourse, children understood them as well as subject relatives, or even better. These results speak against a purely structural explanation for children's difficulty with object relatives as observed in previous studies, but rather support the usage-based account, according to which discourse function and experience with language shape the representation of linguistic structures.

Experience and sentence processing: Statistical learning and relative clause comprehension

Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal to the demands that object relatives make on working memory. MacDonald and Christiansen [MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35–54] pointed to variations in reading experience as a source of differences, arguing that the unique word order of object relatives makes their processing more difficult and more sensitive to the effects of previous experience than the processing of subject relatives. This hypothesis was tested in a large-scale study manipulating reading experiences of adults over several weeks. The group receiving relative clause experience increased reading speeds for object relatives more than for subject relatives, whereas a control experience group did not. The reading time data were compared to performance of a computational model given different amounts of experience. The results support claims for experience-based individual differences and an important role for statistical learning in sentence comprehension processes.

Syntactic and Thematic Constraint Effects on Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent Signal Correlates of Comprehension of Relative Clauses

The effects of plausibility of thematic role assignment and syntactic structure on blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal were studied using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging by orthogonally varying syntactic structure (subject-vs. object-extracted relative clauses) and the plausibility of nouns playing thematic roles (constrained vs. unconstrained sentences) in a plausibility judgment task. In plausible sentences, BOLD signal increased for object-compared to subject-extracted clauses in unconstrained sentences in left middle temporal and left inferior frontal areas, for this contrast in constrained sentences in left middle temporal but not left inferior frontal areas, and for constrained subject-extracted sentences compared to unconstrained subject-extracted sentences in the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We relate these areas of activation to the assignment of the syntactic structure of object-compared to subject-extracted structures and the process of checking which thematic roles activated in the course of processing a sentence are licensed by the syntactic structure of the sentence.

A web-based listening methodology for studying relative clause acquisition

This paper addresses the comprehension of relative clauses in audio prompts using online listening exercises implemented in a classroom. Reaction time to short and long sentences containing subject and object relative clauses was assessed in subjects attending an intensive ESL course for graduate students. The results indicate the possibility that learners shift resources when processing more syntactically complex audio prompts, such as those with object relatives. This shift from a discrete measure such as accuracy to a continuous variable like reaction time accommodates theoretical frameworks which do not rely on categorical paradigms of learning.

Syntactic and thematic constraint effects on BOLD signal correlates of comprehension of relative clauses

Syntactic and thematic constraint effects on BOLD signal correlates of comprehension of relative clauses

The comprehension of Turkish relative clauses in second language acquisition and agrammatism

The purposes of this study are to test whether the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses is easier than that of object relative (OR) clauses in Turkish and to investigate whether the comprehension of SRs can be better explained by the linear distance hypothesis or structural distance hypothesis (SDH). The question is examined in two groups of second language (L2) learners of different proficiency levels and a few agrammatics expected to show a similar pattern. Each participant is asked to comprehend 15 sentences containing SRs and ORs via a picture selection task. The results indicate that comprehension of SRs is easier than that of ORs for intermediate level L2 learners, whereas there is no significant difference between the types of relative clauses for early learners. Another result is that early learners produce errors similar to those of agrammatics, which are explained through trace deletion and referential strategy. These findings on Turkish provide significant support for the SDH.

Word chunk frequencies affect the processing of pronominal object-relative clauses

We present experimental support for the view that fine-grained statistical information may play a crucial role in the processing of centre-embedded linguistic structure. Using both offline and online methods, we show that the processing of pronominal object-relative clauses is influenced by the frequency of co-occurrence of the word combinations (chunks) forming the clause. We use materials that are controlled for capacity-based factors that have been previously shown to influence comprehension of relative clauses. The results suggest that, other factors being equal, the frequency of the word chunk forming the clause affects processing difficulty. Analyses of the data indicate that the results cannot be explained by differential access to individual lexical items. Following recent constructivist approaches, we argue that frequency of co-occurrence influences the chunking mechanism by which multiword sequences may become fused into processing units that are easier to access.

聴覚障害児の関係節の理解

本研究では、聾学校に在籍する聴覚障害児を対象に、関係節の理解についてテスト形式で検討した。実験1では、Hakuta(1982)ほかで示されている健聴児の特徴である、語の配置、語順、格助詞などの要因が影響を与えているのかをみた。その結果、聴覚障害児は健聴児と同様に、語の配置(NNVNVかNVNNVか)という要因に最も影響を受けていた。また、約半数の児童は、健聴児に匹敵する成績を示した。実験2では、関係節理解に既有知識といった意味情報が用いられているのかについて検討したところ、多くの児童では活用されていたが、若干の児童はまったく意味情報を利用しないという結果になった。

Traceless relatives: Agrammatic comprehension of relative clauses with resumptive pronouns

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia fail to interpret reversible movement-derived sentences. According to the Trace Deletion Hypothesis, this impairment in comprehension results from the deletion of traces of phrasal movement. In order to test this hypothesis, we compared object relatives with a trace to identical object relatives that are not derived by syntactic movement and do not include a trace, but rather include a resumptive pronoun at the position of the embedded object. Five Hebrew-speaking individuals with agrammatism and 5 matched controls participated in this study. Comprehension was assessed using a binary sentence–picture matching task of 120 reversible relative clauses per participant, 40 subject relatives, 40 object relatives, and 40 object relatives with a resumptive pronoun. The comprehension of subject relatives was significantly above chance, but the comprehension of both types of object relative was at chance. Importantly, the insertion of a resumptive pronoun at the position of the trace did not improve comprehension. The comprehension of object relatives with resumptive pronouns was at chance, and not different from the comprehension of object relatives with traces. Two modifications for the Trace Deletion Hypothesis are considered: a more general deficit in thematic role assignment over an intervening argument, or a deficit in the construction of CP that results in failure to make the syntactic relation between the relative head above CP, the operator in CP and the embedded pronoun or trace within the relative clause.

Syntactic Movement in Orally Trained Children With Hearing Impairment

This study explored the comprehension and production of sentences derived by syntactic movement, in orally trained school-age Hebrew-speaking children with moderate to profound hearing impairment, aged 7;8-9;9 years. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of relative clauses and topicalization sentences (with word orders of OVS [object, verb, subject] and OSV [object, subject, verb]) using a sentence-picture matching task. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the production of relative clauses using two elicitation tasks. Experiment 5 tested the comprehension of relative clauses with and without resumptive pronouns. As a group, the children with hearing loss failed to understand object relatives and OVS topicalization sentences. In the production tasks they either avoided producing a sentence with syntactic movement, by using a relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun instead of a gap or by producing a sentence without a relative clause, or produced ungrammatical sentences. They understood correctly object relatives with resumptive pronouns, which are not derived by movement. Both comprehension and production of the hearing-impaired group was significantly different from that of the hearing control group. Individual performance was strongly correlated with the age of intervention: only children who received hearing aids before the age of 8 months performed well in the comprehension tasks. Type of hearing aid, duration of use of a cochlear implant, and degree of hearing loss did not correlate with syntactic comprehension.

Syntactic and semantic influences on BOLD signal responses to comprehension of relative clauses

Syntactic and semantic influences on BOLD signal responses to comprehension of relative clauses

Japanese EFL Learners' Sensitivity To Configurational Distinction In English Relative Clause Comprehension

A variety of studies have reported that the order of Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy can be a valid predictor of difficulty of relative clauses, but it is unclear whether the difficulty of relative clauses should be attributed to the grammatical function of noun phrases (grammatical relation) or to configurational differences in the relative clause structure. A few articles have reported that learners of English are more sensitive to configurational distinctions than grammatical relation distinctions in relative clause production. However, not much research on this issue has been conducted. The results of a grammaticality judgment test conducted with 77 Japanese learners of English point toward a stronger sensitivity to configuration than to grammatical relation, favoring the configurational account.

The acquisition of relative clause comprehension in Hebrew: a study of SLI and normal development

Comprehension of relative clauses was assessed in 10 Hebrew-speaking school-age children with syntactic SLI and in two groups of younger children with normal language development. Comprehension of subject- and object-relatives was assessed using a binary sentence-picture matching task. The findings were that while Hebrew-speaking children with normal development comprehend right-branching object relatives around the age of 6 ; 0, children with syntactic SLI are still at chance level in object relatives by age 11 ; 0. The four-year-olds were also at chance on object relatives. Comprehension of subject relatives was good in the SLI group, similar to the six-year-olds, and significantly better than the four-year-olds. The syntactic impairment is interpreted as a selective deficit to non-canonical sentences that are derived by movement.

Language learning

Language learning

Relative clause comprehension revisited: commentary on Eisenberg (2002)

Eisenberg (2002) presents data from an experiment investigating three- and four-year-old children's comprehension of restrictive relative clauses (RC). From the results she argues, contrary to Hamburger & Crain (1982), that children do not have discourse knowledge of the felicity conditions of RCs before acquiring the syntax of relativization. This note evaluates this conclusion on the basis of the methodology used, and proposes that an account of syntactic development needs to be sensitive to the real-time processing requirements acquisition places on the learner.

Processing Difficulty in Comprehension and Production of Relative Clauses by Learners of English as a Second Language

This study tested the predictions of three major hypotheses of relative clause acquisition in second language acquisition: Keenan and Comrie's (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH), Kuno's (1974) Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH), and Hamilton's (1994) SO Hierarchy Hypothesis (SOHH). These hypotheses are based on different rationales and make different predictions on the difficulty order of different relative clause sentence types. Analyses of the data collected from 61 learners of English as a second language in three different elicitation tasks found mixed support for the NPAH and the SOHH and full support for the PDH. Generally, the results suggest a complementary relationship between the NPAH and the PDH. Some differences observed in different tasks point to the importance of examining learners' processing problems in multiple tasks in different modalities.