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ERIC Number: EJ873663
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-Jan
Pages: 31
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Rethinking Child Difficulty: The Effect of NP Type on Children's Processing of Relative Clauses in Hebrew
Arnon, Inbal
Journal of Child Language, v37 n1 p27-57 Jan 2010
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 that the girl is drawing"). When tested on object relatives with pronominal subjects (e.g. "The nurse that I am 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. (Contains 8 tables, 2 figures, and 1 footnote.)
Cambridge University Press. The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge, CB2 8RU, UK. Tel: 800-872-7423; Tel: 845-353-7500; Tel: +44-1223-326070; Fax: 845-353-4141; Fax: +44-1223-325150; e-mail: subscriptions_newyork@cambridge.org; Web site: http://www.cambridge.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A