How do language-specific characteristics affect the acquisition of different relative clause types? Evidence from Finnish

Abstract

Kirjavainen, M., Kidd, E. and Lieven, E. (2017) Disclaimer UWE has obtained warranties from all depositors as to their title in the material deposited and as to their right to deposit such material. UWE makes no representation or warranties of commercial utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in respect of any material deposited. UWE makes no representation that the use of the materials will not infringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights. UWE accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement. AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank the nursery staff and children in Kotka, Finland for their participation in the study and the corpus child and her family for the data collection they conducted. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their 2 helpful comments. The study was funded by a post doctoral research grant from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to the first author. AbstractWe report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e., oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested children's comprehension of subject, object and two types of oblique relatives.No difference was found in the children's performance on different structures, including a lack of previously widely reported asymmetry between subject and object relatives. However, children's comprehension was modulated by animacy of the head referent. Study 3 tested children's production of the same RC structures using sentence repetition. Again we found no subject-object asymmetry. The pattern of results suggested that distributional frequency patterns and the relative complexity of the relativizer contribute to the difficulty associated with particular RC structures.

Mandarin–English speaking bilingual and Mandarin speaking monolingual children’s comprehension of relative clauses

“…When we restrict our analysis to true RCs only, we see the opposite effect: object RCs are more frequent than subject RCs (95 vs. 26). Consistent with similar analyses in other languages (Diessel, 2009;Kidd et al, 2007;Kirjavainen et al, 2017), the majority of the object RCs had inanimate head nouns (90 inanimate vs. 5 animate), whereas animacy in subject RC head nouns was more balanced (16 inanimate vs. 10 animate).…”

“…However, what is not entirely clear is whether it holds crosslinguistically. While the subject advantage is robust in commonly studied languages, such as English (Kidd & Bavin, 2002), German (Brandt, Kidd, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2009), and Italian (Adani, 2011), in addition to Hebrew (Arnon, 2010;Friedman, Belletti, & Rizzi, 2009), several counterexamples of an object advantage or null effects have been reported in morphologically rich languages such as Basque (Carreiras, Duñabeitia, Vergara, de la Cruz-Pavía, & Laka, 2010;Gutierrez-Mangado, 2011), Finnish (Kirjavainen, Kidd, & Lieven, 2017;Kirjavainen & Lieven, 2011), Japanese (Ozeki & Shirai, 2007a;Suzuki, 2011), and Quechua (Courtney, 2006(Courtney, , 2011. In this study we focus on one language that has produced notably inconsistent results across studies but which is a particularly important language for deciding between two classes of theories: Mandarin.…”

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

“…For children, this advantage was demonstrated as more accurate comprehension (Hebrew: Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2004), production (Danish: Jensen de López, Sundahl Olsen, & Chondrogianni, 2014), and repetition (English and German: Diessel & Tomasello, 2005) of subject relative clauses. However, studies conducted in Basque (Gutierrez-Mangado, 2011), Finnish (Kirjavainen et al, 2017), and Japanese (Suzuki, 2011) revealed that this advantage is not universal and cannot be accounted for by syntactic accounts only (such as the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie, 1977) and the Linear Distance Hypothesis (Gibson, 1998)). That not only syntactic but also semantic features of relative clauses affect their processing has been shown by studies finding that both adult and child speakers find object relatives with inanimate head nouns and personal pronominal subjects (e.g., the building that I saw) much easier to process than the ones with animate head nouns and lexical subjects (e.g., the bird that the cat saw) (Arnon, 2010;Kidd, Brandt, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2007;Mak, Vonk, & Schriefers, 2006;Traxler, Morris, & Seely, 2002).…”

“…Young children's acquisition and use of relative clauses has been investigated in typologically diverse languages (e.g., Arnon, 2010;Brandt, Diessel, & Tomasello, 2008;Courtney, 2006;Hamburger & Crain, 1982;Ozeki & Shirai, 2010). The order of acquisition and frequency of different types of relative clauses in child speech, and their functions in child-directed interactions differ across languages (e.g., Chen & Shirai, 2015;Kirjavainen, Kidd, & Lieven, 2017;Ozeki & Shirai, 2007). Here we investigate the acquisition and use of relative clauses by Turkish-speaking children within a large age range (0;8 to 5;4) through examining their spontaneous conversations with their caregivers and peers.…”

Priming the Comprehension of German Object Relative Clauses

“…Relative clauses (RCs) are a commonly studied structure in both adult and child psycholinguistic research. It is a well-known phenomenon that, at least for most European languages (Kirjavainen, Kidd, & Lieven, 2016), subject RCs such as (1) are easier to process for both children and adults than object RCs such as (2) (e.g., Diessel & Tomasello, 2005;Gibson, 1998).…”