Young children’s production of head-final relative clauses: Elicited production data from Chinese children

Abstract

This study examines young children's production of head-final relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese. Three different hypotheses (the Canonical Word Order Hypothesis, the Filler-gap Linear Distance Hypothesis, and the Structural Distance Hypothesis) have been proposed to account for the subject-object asymmetry found in children's performance with head-initial RCs in English. The structure of Chinese head-final RCs is minimally different from that of English head-initial RCs and thus provides an ideal case to examine the effect of different factors that are confounded in English. Our findings fail to support the Canonical Word Order Hypothesis and the Filler-gap Linear Distance Hypothesis. Instead, we suggest that it is the gap position in the hierarchical structure that affects children's production performance with subject-gapped and object-gapped RCs. Our findings also suggest that Mandarin Chinese does not belong to the group of East Asian languages which has been argued to have an acquisition pattern for RCs that is different from the one found in European languages. In addition, the cross-linguistic comparison of production errors suggests that the occurrence of the head noun in the sequential order of the production string affects the type of errors children make during the sentence production process.

Incremental processing in head-final child language: online comprehension of relative clauses in Turkish-speaking children and adults

“…As far as the acquisition of pre-nominal RCs is concerned, cross-linguistic studies have provided contrasting findings as to whether children show better performance in SRC compared to ORCs (e.g., Hsu et al, 2009;Kim, 1997;Ozeki & Shirai, 2010). For Turkish, although there is converging evidence for subject preference in child language, there is an ongoing debate regarding the underlying cause of this pattern.…”

The subject advantage in relative clauses: A review

“…Children demonstrate a stronger reliance on the resumption strategy (whether with pronouns, prepositional pronominals, or full NPs) when they are under pressure to produce a more difficult construction, such as ORCs. Hebrew and Mandarin Chinese both allow resumptive ORCs to be used interchangeably with gapped ORCs; children of these languages were found to use the resumptive pronoun strategy predominantly with ORCs, even when the gapping option is available, whereas the proportion of resumptive SRCs was much lower (Hebrew: Varlokosta & Armon-Lotem 1998;Arnon 2005;Mandarin: Chiu 1996;Hsu et al 2009).…”

Active Gap Filling and Island Constraint in Processing the Mandarin “Gap-Type” Topic Structure

“…Another set of related ERP evidence comes from research on Chinese relative clauses, which also contain an overt English-like filler-gap dependency, and have sparked debates about whether syntactic movement is involved in their derivation, much like the "gap-type" topic structure. Although the research on Chinese relative clauses mainly focuses on whether subject or object relative clauses are more costly to process (e.g., Hsiao and Gibson, 2003;Lin and Bever, 2006;Packard et al, 2010;Hsu et al, 2009), the findings to date indicate that many aspects of Chinese relative clause processing resemble movement-derived filler-gap dependencies in other languages such as English (e.g., Yang et al, 2010). In particular, multiple studies have found a larger P600 indicative of syntactic integration cost for object relatives at or next to the subcategorizing verb (e.g., Packard et al, 2010;Yang et al, 2010), mirroring ERP results previously obtained for English, German, and Japanese (e.g., Felser et al, 2003, Phillips et al, 2005Ueno and Kluender, 2009).…”