ERIC Number: EJ777436
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007-Jun
Pages: 24
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0272-2631
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Relative Clauses in Cantonese-English Bilingual Children: Typological Challenges and Processing Motivations
Yip, Virginia; Matthews, Stephen
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, v29 n2 p277-300 Jun 2007
Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or simultaneously with subject relatives, and in their English, prenominal relatives based on Cantonese emerged first, with object relatives followed by subject relatives. These findings are discussed in light of findings on the typology and acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and the underlying processing motivations of the NPAH. Prenominal object relatives in the bilingual children's Cantonese and English have the same word order as main clauses and can be analyzed as internally headed RCs. The reconceptualization of RCs as attributive clauses (Comrie, 1998a, 1998b, 2002) is supported by children's early RCs lacking a strict grammatical relationship between the head noun and the predicate. Furthermore, as observed by Diessel and Tomasello (2000, 2005) for English, bilingual children's earliest RCs consist of isolated noun phrases (NPs). The early object relatives produced by bilingual children are therefore essentially NPs with the linear order of a main clause, resulting in a configuration that is conducive to early production. [This research was supported in part by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.]
Descriptors: Nouns, Foreign Countries, Word Order, Language Acquisition, Bilingualism, Phrase Structure, English (Second Language), Sino Tibetan Languages, Second Language Learning, Longitudinal Studies, Linguistic Theory, Grammar
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong, Kowloon.; Hong Kong Univ.
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Hong Kong
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
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