Discourse accessibility constraints in children’s processing of object relative clauses

Abstract

Children’s poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms. We conducted a visual-world study designed to test the off-line comprehension and on-line processing of object relatives in German-speaking 5-year-olds. Children were tested on three types of object relatives, all having a full DP head noun and differing with respect to the type of nominal phrase that appeared in the embedded subject position: another full DP, a 1st- or a 3rd-person pronoun. Grammatical skills and memory capacity were also assessed in order to see whether and how they affect children’s performance. Most accurately processed were object relatives with 1st-person pronoun, independently of children’s language and memory skills. Performance on object relatives with two full DPs was overall more accurate than on object relatives with 3rd-person pronoun. In the former condition, children with stronger grammatical skills accurately processed the structure and their memory abilities determined how fast they were; in the latter condition, children only processed accurately the structure if they were strong both in their grammatical skills and in their memory capacity. The results are discussed in the light of accounts that predict different pronoun effects like the ones we find, which depend on the referential properties of the pronouns. We then discuss which role language and memory abilities might have in processing object relatives with various embedded nominal phrases.

The Peaceful Co-existence of Input Frequency and Structural Intervention Effects on the Comprehension of Complex Sentences in German-Speaking Children

“…This comparison yielded converging response patterns. But since our experiment focuses on the animacy constraint, the pronoun constraint will be not further discussed (but see also Arnon, 2010 ; Haendler et al, 2015 ).…”

Testing the effect of an arbitrary subject pronoun on relative clause comprehension: a study with Hebrew-speaking children

“…The lack of pronoun facilitation in the present study is related to more than the effect of ASP. The claim that embedded pronouns facilitate OR comprehension has also been made on the basis of studies that looked at ORs with first or second person pronouns (Arnon, 2010;Brandt et al, 2016;Haendler et al, 2015;Kidd, Brandt, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2007). However, just like the mismatch in Number might have facilitated ORs with ASP, the mismatch in the feature Person could have caused the facilitation in ORs with first and second person pronouns.…”

“…Previous research has mainly concentrated on the different effect of first and third person pronouns. Both adults (Warren & Gibson, 2002) and children (Haendler et al, 2015) process ORs more accurately when the embedded pronoun is a first person, as compared to a third person pronoun. This first/third person pronoun asymmetry has been explained in relation to the level of difficulty with which the referents of the pronouns are identified and retrieved from discourse.…”

“…Interestingly, difficulties with ORs are reduced when the embedded subject is a pronoun, as in (3). This facilitation has been attested in ORs whose embedded subject is a first or second person pronoun ('I' / 'you') (Arnon, 2010;Brandt, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2016;Haendler, Kliegl, & Adani, 2015), as well as in the case of third person pronouns like 'he' or 'they' (Brandt, Kidd, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2009;Lassotta, Adelt, Stadie, Burchert, & Adani, 2015).…”

“…The grammatical features characterizing this pronoun are evident in the agreement marking (plural, masculine) on the embedded verb mesarkim 'comb.PL.MASC' in (4). Similarly, the facilitation of ORs with an embedded first or second person pronoun (Arnon, 2010;Brandt et al, 2016;Haendler et al, 2015) might be explained as due to a mismatch in Person, another overtly marked grammatical feature that is different on the head noun (third person) and on the embedded pronoun (first/second person).…”