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Rethinking child difficulty: The effect of NP type on children's processing of relative clauses in Hebrew*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2009

INBAL ARNON
INBAL ARNON*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Address for correspondence: Inbal Arnon, Linguistics Department, Margaret Jacks Hall, Stanford University, CA, 94305. e-mail: inbalar@stanford.edu
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Abstract

Children find object relative clauses difficult. They show poor comprehension that lags behind production into their fifth year. This finding has shaped models of relative clause acquisition, with appeals to processing heuristics or syntactic preferences to explain why object relatives are more difficult than subject relatives. Two studies here suggest that children (age 4 ; 6) do not find all object relatives difficult: a corpus study shows that children most often hear and produce object relatives with pronominal subjects. But they are most often tested on ones with lexical-NP subjects (e.g. The nurse thatthe girlis drawing). When tested on object relatives with pronominal subjects (e.g. The nurse thatIam drawing), similar to those they actually hear and produce, Hebrew speakers aged 4 ; 6 show good comprehension (85% accuracy) that matches their production ability. This suggests a different path of relative clause acquisition, one that is sensitive to fine-grained distributional information.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 27 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

I thank Eve Clark for guidance and stimulating discussions. I thank Florian Jaeger for pointing out problems with the use of ANOVAs for analyzing categorical variables and for invaluable statistical help. I thank Joan Bresnan, Daniel Cassasanto, Ted Gibson, Florian Jaeger, Dan Jurafsky, Evan Kidd, Lis Norcliffe, Neal Snider, Laura Staum, Hal Tily, Tom Wasow and the audience at AMLAP 2006 and CUNY 2006 for helpful discussions and insightful comments. I thank Professor Ruth Butler for careful reading and valuable advice. All remaining errors are of course my own. I thank the teachers and children of the Montessori kindergarten in Modi'in, Israel, who made this study possible.

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