Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T04:23:49.142Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The acquisition of Chinese relative clauses: contrasting two theoretical approaches*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2015

SHENAI HU ,
ANNA GAVARRÓ ,
MIRTA VERNICE  and
MARIA TERESA GUASTI
SHENAI HU*
Affiliation:
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain and University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
ANNA GAVARRÓ
Affiliation:
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
MIRTA VERNICE
Affiliation:
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
MARIA TERESA GUASTI
Affiliation:
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
*
Address for correspondence: Shenai Hu, Dipartimento di Psicologia, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examines the comprehension of relative clauses by Chinese-speaking children, and evaluates the validity of the predictions of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the Relativized Minimality approach (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi, 2009). One hundred and twenty children from three to eight years of age were tested by using a character–sentence matching task. We found a preference for subject relative clauses that persists as children grow older. This preference is predicted by the Relativized Minimality approach, but not by the Dependency Locality Theory. In addition, we observed a fine-grained class of errors in comprehension. We discuss it in the light of the head-final status of Chinese relative clauses.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 1 - 21
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Many thanks are due to all the participants in the experiments reported. We also wish to acknowledge the China Scholarship Council and the project FFI 2011-29440-C03-03 (CLT, UAB) for funding; Fabrizio Arosio, Carlo Cecchetto, Shuangling Hu, Meilian Zhang, and, for the materials, Candice Coyer, Anamaria Bentea, and Stephanie Durrleman. Our deep thanks also go to the action editor and Professor Helen Goodluck for their valuable comments and advice.

References

REFERENCES

Adani, F. (2011). Rethinking the acquisition of relative clauses in Italian: towards a grammatically based account. Journal of Child Language 38, 141–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Adani, F., van der Lely, H., Forgiarini, M. & Guasti, M. T. (2010). Grammatical feature dissimilarities make relative clause easier: a comprehension study with Italian Children. Lingua 120, 2148–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Arnon, I. (2005). Relative clause acquisition in Hebrew: towards a processing-oriented account. In Brugos, A., Clark-Cotton, M. R. & Ha, S. (eds), Proceedings of the 29th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 37–48. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. (2010). Rethinking child difficulty: the effect of NP type on children's processing of relative clauses in Hebrew. Journal of Child Language 37, 27–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Arosio, F., Adani, F. & Guasti, M. T. (2009). Grammatical features in the comprehension of Italian relative clauses by children. In Brucart, J. M., Gavarró, A. & Solà, J. (eds), Merging features: computation, interpretation and acquisition, (pp. 138–155). Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belletti, A., Friedmann, N., Brunato, D. & Rizzi, L. (2012). Does gender make a difference? Comparing the effect of gender on children's comprehension of relative clauses in Hebrew and Italian. Lingua 122, 1053–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belletti, A. & Rizzi, L. (2013). Ways of avoiding intervention: some thoughts on the development of object relatives, passive and control. In Piattelli-Palmarini, M. & Berwick, R. C. (eds), Rich languages from poor inputs, 115–126. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, H. D. (1971). Children's comprehension of relativized English sentences. Child Development 42(6), 1923–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cao, S. X.-X., Goodluck, H. & Shan, X.-Y. (2005). Double-gapped relative clauses in Chinese: grammar and processing. In Otsu, Y. (ed.), The proceedings of the Sixth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, 53–68. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.Google Scholar
Chang, H.-W. (1984). The comprehension of complex Chinese sentences by children: relative clause. Chinese Journal of Psychology 26, 57–66.Google Scholar
Chen, B.-G., Ning, A.-H., Bi, H.-Y. & Dunlap, S. (2008). Chinese subject-relative clauses are more difficult to process than the object-relative clauses. Acta Psychologica 129, 61–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chiu, B. H.-C. (1996). The nature of relative clauses in Chinese-speaking children. NSC research report, National Taiwan Normal University.Google Scholar
Correa, L. M. S. (1995). An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 24(3), 183–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S. & Thornton, R. (1998). Investigations in universal grammar: a guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Erbaugh, M. S. (1986). Taking stock: the development of Chinese noun classifiers historically and in young children. In Craig, C. (ed.), Noun classes and categorization: proceedings of a Symposium on Categorization and Noun Classification, 399–436. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franck, J., Lassi, G., Frauenfelder, U. H. & Rizzi, L. (2006). Agreement and movement: a syntactic analysis of attraction. Cognition 101, 173–216.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friedmann, N., Belletti, A. & Rizzi, L. (2009). Relativized relatives: types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua 119, 67–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedmann, N. & Novogrodsky, R. (2004). The acquisition of relative clause comprehension in Hebrew: a study of SLI and normal development. Journal of Child Language 31, 661–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gavarró, A., Adani, F., Ramon, M., Rusiñol, S. & Sànchez, R. (2012a). La comprensió de les clàusules de relatiu en català infantil. Caplletra 53, 1–15.Google Scholar
Gavarró, A., Cunill, A., Muntané, M. & Reguant, M. (2012b). The acquisition of Catalan relatives: structure and processing. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique/Romanian Review of Linguistics 57(2), 183–201.Google Scholar
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68, 1–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency locality theory: a distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Marantz, A., Miyashita, Y. & O'Neil, W. (eds), Image, language, brain, 95–126. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gibson, E. & Wu, H.-H. I. (2013). Processing Chinese relative clauses in context. Language and Cognitive Processes 28, 125–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodluck, H. (1996). The act-out task. In McDaniel, D., McKee, C. & Cairns, H. (eds), Methods for assessing children's syntax, 147–162. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Goodluck, H. (2010). Object extraction is not subject to Child Relativized Minimality. Lingua 120, 1516–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gutiérrez-Mangado, M. J. (2011). Children's comprehension of relative clauses in an ergative language: the case of Basque. Language Acquisition 18(3), 176–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hsiao, F. & Gibson, E. (2003). Processing relative clauses in Chinese. Cognition 90, 3–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hu, S.-A. (2014). Intervention effects and the acquisition of relativization and topicalization in Chinese. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona & Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. Online: <http://www.tdx.cat/handle/10803/283652> and <https://boa.unimib.it/handle/10281/53875>.+and+.>Google Scholar
Labelle, M. (1990). Predication, wh-movement, and the development of relative clauses. Language Acquisition 1(1), 95–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, T. H.-T. (1992). The inadequacy of processing heuristics – evidence from relative clause acquisition in Mandarin Chinese. In Lee, T. (ed.), Research on Chinese linguistics in Hong Kong, 47–85. Hong Kong: Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Limber, J. (1973). The genesis of complex sentences. In Moore, T. E. (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language, 169–185. New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lin, C.-J. C. & Bever, T. G. (2006). Subject preference in the processing of relative clauses in Chinese. In Baumer, D., Montero, D. & Scanlon, M. (eds), Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 254–260. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Lin, C.-J. C. & Bever, T. G. (2011). Garden path and the comprehension of head-final relative clauses. In Yamashita, H., Hirose, Y. & Packard, J. L. (eds), Processing and producing head-final structures, 277–297. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Morrill, G. (2010). Categorial grammar: logical syntax, semantics, and processing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Packard, J. L., Ye, Z. & Zhou, X. L. (2011). Filler–gap processing in Mandarin relative clauses: evidence from event-related potentials. In Yamashita, H., Hirose, Y. & Packard, J. L. (eds), Processing and producing head-final structures, 219–240. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Qiao, X.-M., Shen, L.-Y. & Forster, K. (2012). Relative clause processing in Mandarin: evidence from the maze task. Language and Cognitive Processes 27(4), 611–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sheldon, A. (1974). The role of parallel functions in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13, 272–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheldon, A. (1977). On strategies for processing relative clauses: a comparison of children and adults. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 6(4), 305–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Starke, M. (2001). Move dissolves into Merge: a theory of locality. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Geneva.Google Scholar
Su, Y.-C. (2006). Word order effect in children's garden path of relative clauses. Concentric 32(2), 33–57.Google Scholar
Suzuki, T. (2011). A case-marking cue for filler–gap dependencies in children's relative clauses in Japanese. Journal of Child Language 38, 1084–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vasishth, S., Chen, Z., Li, Q. & Guo, G. (2013). Processing Chinese relative clauses: evidence for the subject-relative advantage. PloS ONE 8 (10): e77006.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wu, F.-Y. (2009). Factors affecting relative clause processing in Mandarin. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar