The acquisition of relative clauses by Tamil children

This paper reports the findings of a cross-sectional study that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses by 27 Tamil-speaking children, who ranged in age from 2;11 to 6;6. A picture-cued production task was used to elicit relative clauses from the child subjects. An analysis of the subjects' responses revealed that children below the age of 5;0 relativized significantly less often than the older children; furthermore, when they did produce relative clauses, they exhibited a strong preference for the tag relative and produced significantly fewer participial relatives than the older children. The findings also indicated that the younger children produced a significantly greater number of pragmatically inappropriate responses than the older children. It is argued that the observed age-related differences in Tamil children's relativizations very likely stem from performance factors and that the younger children are probably not inferior to the older children with respect to their grammatical and pragmatic competence.