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Many of the earliest studies of child language acquisition were collected in the form of

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understanding coordination and relative clauses with crossing dependencies

Young children find (some) object relatives much harder to understand than subject relatives. The main finding of this article is that not all object relatives are difficult. The difficulty with object relatives (and object Wh-questions) is selective: it depends on the structural similarity between the A’-moved element and the intervening subject. We interpret this selective effect in terms of a proper extension of Relativized Minimality, the principle of syntactic theory which expresses locality effects linked to intervention, and whose psycholinguistic relevance has been highlighted in Grillo’s work on agrammatism. Six experiments have been conducted with 22 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3;7-5;0 to substantiate our claims empirically. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of headed subject and object relatives with and without a resumptive pronoun, in sentences with lexically restricted (D-NP) subjects. Subject relatives were comprehended well, but the performance on object relatives was at chance. The addition of resumptive pronouns did not improve comprehension. Experiments 3 and 4 manipulated the lexical restriction of the moved element and the intervening subject, using free relatives and impersonal pro subjects

Definitions that children provide can be a valuable measure of their syntax, and specifically, of their ability to produce relative-clauses. This research explored the acquisition of subject-, object-, and indirect-object-relative clauses in 121 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3;5-8;6. The children were asked to define 14 nouns, and their responses were collected and analyzed for various syntactic aspects. The main results were that children started using relative-clauses in their definitions at age 3;8, and their use of relative-clause increased consistently until they were 6-years-old. Retesting 38 of the 6-year-olds at age 8;6 indicated no differences in several syntactic measures between their production of relative clauses at age 6 and 8;6, suggesting that the ability to produce relative-clauses stabilizes around age 6. The participants made almost no grammatical errors at any of the ages, probably because they avoided the use of relative-clauses when they had not mastered them yet. In the early stages participants produced mainly headless relatives, and with age the use of a relative head increased. The acquisition of relative clauses was not related to the ability to embed or to the ability to use pronouns: these abilities existed already in the youngest age group and remained constant throughout the age groups. “A thief is someone who takes things and who returns them later”, said determinedly one of our four-year-old participants. This might not be the best definition for a thief, but it can

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belletti uniisi.it chesi media.unisii.it A well-kknown classiccal finding froom both acquuisition and processing is that (heeaded) Object Relative Clauuses (ORs) are hardder than (headeed) Subject Reelative Clauses (SRs) for children to acquire, and slower for adults to process