The role of resumptive pronouns in Cantonese relative clause acquisition

Abstract

Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examined whether the same pattern is found in Cantonese, a language that allows resumption as a legitimate relativization strategy. Young Cantonese monolingual children were tested for both comprehension and production of object relative clauses using different relativization strategies (the gap strategy vs. the resumptive pronoun strategy). Although children did not perform better on either strategy in comprehension, and never employed resumptive pronouns in their production, resumption did prevent misanalysis of prenominal relative clauses as matrix clauses, suggesting that these elements help reveal the full structure of the relative clause to the processor. The study also showed better performance on subject than on object relative clauses, suggesting that the widely observed subject–object asymmetry also applies to Cantonese.

Four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of relative clauses: a permutation analysis

“…The significant object advantage for CL RCs is consistent with past comprehension research with four-year-old monolingual children (Chan et al , 2011; cf. Lau, 2016), extending the result to online data. The result is consistent with the suggestion that children gain added value from the isomorphism between simple SVO transitives and classifier object RCs (Chan et al , 2011; Diessel, 2007).…”

“…This referential account depends on having a discourse context where there is an expectation for noun modification, as in our test materials. When this expectation is not set up, as in Lau (2016), children are often garden-pathed, and do interpret the sentences as SVO transitives (see also Kidd et al , 2015, who showed this occurs in Cantonese–English bilinguals).…”

“…In contrast, the production experiment, which used the sentence imitation method, revealed a numerical but non-significant object advantage. In contrast, Lau (2016) reported on three- to five-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's comprehension of CL RCs using picture selection, and reported a significant subject advantage. The difference between the Chan et al and Lau studies was that, whereas Chan et al presented test RC structures in a supportive discourse context (thereby fulfilling the felicity conditions governing RC use; see Corrêa, 1995), the study reported in Lau did not.…”

An asymmetry in the acquisition of relative clauses: Evidence from Tagalog

“…Following the methodology used in previous studies (e.g., Lau, 2016), each test item consisted of a panel of two pictures depicting reversible events (Tanaka et al, 2016). A sample test item is shown in Figure 1.…”

Comprehension of Subject and Object Relative Clauses in a Trilingual Acquisition Context

“…Moreover, Cantonese learners could make use of simple transitives to bootstrap onto Cantonese object RCs, especially of the classifier type, in production. On the other hand, we also acknowledged that their surface identity with SVO main clauses could cause problems in comprehension, notably by leading Cantonese object classifier RCs to be mis-parsed as SVO transitive main clauses (Lau, 2016b ), due to structural ambiguity. The potential to be misled due to competing analyses in sentence parsing could become more complicated for multilingual children acquiring Cantonese RCs under heavy influence from English, especially when there are additional competing constructions due to structural overlaps between the children's languages.…”