The subject advantage in relative clauses: A review

Abstract

The question of whether there exists a universal subject preference in relativization has stimulated research in a wide range of languages and across different domains, yielding an extensive body of literature in relative clause acquisition and processing. In this article, we aim at consolidating the efforts of existing research in order to inform further exploration of the universality of the subject preference with a comprehensive analysis of relevant work (including journal articles on empirical studies, dissertations, and conference proceedings). We present an overview of the proposals regarding the source(s) of the subject-object asymmetry from a cross-linguistic perspective and discuss commonly used methodologies in this research area, and we survey the research on relative clause processing and acquisition of different linguistic communities, including native speakers, second language learners, clinical populations, and heritage speakers.

The role of number mismatch and exposure in the comprehension of relative clauses in bilingual children

“…However, a few studies display the opposite pattern, and several studies fail to find a significant difference between subject and object relatives altogether. Of importance to the current study, we should notice that in Slavic languages the asymmetry was observed in only three out of five studies (Lau & Tanaka, 2021). To our knowledge, there are no studies assessing this asymmetry in Czech (the languages tested are Russian, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian).…”

“…The data on head-final languages are more controversial, however, sometimes showing a subject-object asymmetry, as in Chinese (Hu et al, 2016), and sometimes the opposite pattern, as in Basque (Gutierrez-Mangado, 2011). An extensive review recently published by Lau and Tanaka (2021) attempts to assess whether the subject advantage in relative clauses should be considered a language universal or not. The authors show that there is a clear tendency towards a subject advantage across a wide variety of languages, and studies demonstrating a subject advantage are by far the most common.…”

How diverse is child language acquisition?

“…For instance, early in acquisition young children produce prosodicallyconstrained truncated words, the manner in which they do so varying by language (Demuth, 1996;Forshaw, 2021;Fikkert, 1994). Crosslinguistically, there is an observable though not invariable preference to relativise syntactic subjects (see Kidd, 2011;Lau & Tanaka, 2021).…”

Developing a unified feature-based model for L2 lexical and syntactic processing

“…In contrast, a processing advantage for subject relative clauses has consistently emerged from research. Most of the findings show that subject relative clauses are acquired earlier and are easier to produce and to process than object relative clauses in many languages (Lau & Tanaka, 2021). The learning process mirrors the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy of Keenan & Comrie (1977), according to which subject relative clauses are the easiest type of relative clause, followed by object and indirect object relative clauses.…”

“…Consistent experimental evidence has shown that object relative clauses are processed more slowly than subject relative clauses. This has been observed in L1 speakers (Gibson et al, 2005;Lau & Tanaka, 2021;Santi et al, 2019;Staub, 2010;Traxler et al, 2002Traxler et al, , 2005 and L2 speakers alike (see Juffs & Rodrigues, 2015 for review). In contrast, a processing advantage for subject relative clauses has consistently emerged from research.…”