Children's comprehension of relative clauses

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Children's comprehension of relative clauses shows inconsistent findings in existing literature.
• Previous studies may not have adequately considered noun phrase embeddedness and head noun focus.
• Disparate results necessitate further investigation into factors influencing relative clause processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To reconcile contradictory findings on children's relative clause comprehension.
• To investigate the impact of embeddedness and focus on relative clause understanding.
• To extend the range of relative clause constructions examined in children.

Main Methods:

• Comprehension test using an act-out procedure with 114 children aged 3-7 years.
• Examined 9 distinct relative clause sentence types, covering all combinations of noun phrase roles (subject, direct object, indirect object) and head noun roles.
• Controlled for variables such as sex and sentence set.

Main Results:

• Comprehension of all relative clause constructions improved with increasing age.
• Sex and sentence set were found to be nonsignificant variables.
• A specific difficulty ordering of the 9 construction types was observed, aligning with surface structure processing predictions.

Conclusions:

• Children's understanding of relative clauses is influenced by grammatical complexity and age.
• Surface structure processing strategies appear to play a role in children's interpretation of relative clauses.
• The study provides a framework for understanding developmental trends in relative clause acquisition.