TY - JOUR

T1 - The discourse bases of relativization

T2 - an investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

AU - Brandt, Silke

AU - Kidd, Evan

AU - Lieven, Elena

AU - Tomasello, Michael

PY - 2009/8

Y1 - 2009/8

N2 - In numerous comprehension studies, across different languages, children have performed worse on object relatives (e.g., the dog that the cat chased) than on subject relatives (e.g., the dog that chased the cat). One possible reason for this is that the test sentences did not exactly match the kinds of object relatives that children typically experience. Adults and children usually hear and produce object relatives with inanimate heads and pronominal subjects (e.g., the car that we bought last year) (cf. Kidd et al. 2007). We tested young 3-year old German- and English-speaking children with a referential selection task. Children from both language groups performed best in the condition where the experimenter described inanimate referents with object relatives that contained pronominal subjects (e.g., Can you give me the sweater that he bought?). Importantly, when the object relatives met the constraints identified in spoken discourse, children understood them as well as subject relatives, or even better. These results speak against a purely structural explanation for children's difficulty with object relatives as observed in previous studies, but rather support the usage-based account, according to which discourse function and experience with language,shape the representation of linguistic structures.

AB - In numerous comprehension studies, across different languages, children have performed worse on object relatives (e.g., the dog that the cat chased) than on subject relatives (e.g., the dog that chased the cat). One possible reason for this is that the test sentences did not exactly match the kinds of object relatives that children typically experience. Adults and children usually hear and produce object relatives with inanimate heads and pronominal subjects (e.g., the car that we bought last year) (cf. Kidd et al. 2007). We tested young 3-year old German- and English-speaking children with a referential selection task. Children from both language groups performed best in the condition where the experimenter described inanimate referents with object relatives that contained pronominal subjects (e.g., Can you give me the sweater that he bought?). Importantly, when the object relatives met the constraints identified in spoken discourse, children understood them as well as subject relatives, or even better. These results speak against a purely structural explanation for children's difficulty with object relatives as observed in previous studies, but rather support the usage-based account, according to which discourse function and experience with language,shape the representation of linguistic structures.

KW - object relative clauses

KW - cross-linguistic acquisition

KW - processing

KW - discourse function

KW - input frequencies

U2 - 10.1515/COGL.2009.024

DO - 10.1515/COGL.2009.024

M3 - Journal article

VL - 20

SP - 539

EP - 570

JO - Cognitive Linguistics

JF - Cognitive Linguistics

SN - 0936-5907

IS - 3

ER -