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

Abstract

In numerous comprehension studies, across di¤erent 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. 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 di‰culty 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.

A Constructivist Account of Child Language Acquisition

“…Even later in development, when children's knowledge becomes more abstract, they still show better performance for relative clause sentences that are consistent with these construction prototypes, even when these are object as opposed to subject relatives and hence -from a formal linguistic perspective -more complex (e.g., Kidd et al, 2007;Diessel and Tomasello, 2005). Similar findings were also observed for German (Diessel and Tomasello, 2005;Brandt, Kidd, Lieven, and Tomasello, 2009) and Hebrew (Arnon, 2010).…”

Türkçede İlgi Tümceciklerinin Edinimine Kullanım Temelli bir Yaklaşım

“…This study adopts an approach used in recent studies with respect to RC acquisition in different languages (Brandt, 2011;Arnon, 2011;Brandt et al 2009). This approach involves usage-based/functional analyses of the acquisition of Turkish RCs through child-directed speech.…”

“…Across a wide range of studies investigating RC acquisition in Turkish; it is clear that RCs are acquired and produced late in Turkish (for further discussion, see Kornfilt et al 2012). Nevertheless; a usage-based point of view into RC acquisition is relevant since it focuses on the functions and communicative patterns of RCs in early language development (Brandt, 2011;Brandt et al, 2009). …”

“…Kidd (2011) explains that the poor comprehension scores of children reported in previous experimental studies (Arnon, 2011;Brandt et al, 2009;Diessel &Tomasello, 2005) are due to the nature of the tests. He argues that these studies employed act-out tests where the children were asked to comprehend the RC constructions without appropriate discourse context and the test sentences were unnatural both in form and function.…”

“…Most of the previous studies on the development of RCs have mainly concentrated on European languages such as English, German and French through experimental studies (Diessel & Tomasello, 2005;Hamburger & Crain, 1982;Brandt, Kidd, Lieven & Tomasello 2009) and through naturalistic observational studies (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000;Fox & Thompson, 2007;Jisa & Kern, 1998). Turkish, as a prenominal relative clause language, receives much attention with the late acquisition of relative clauses.…”