The Acquisition of Relative Clauses
Processing, typology and function
1st Edition
Published on 23. November 2011
VIII, 244 pages
978-90-272-8340-5 (ISBN)
Description
Explaining the acquisition and processing of relative clauses has long challenged psycholinguistics researchers. The current volume presents a collection of chapters that consider the acquisition of relative clauses with a particular focus on function, typology, and language processing. A diverse range of theoretical approaches and languages are bought to bear on the acquisition of this construction type, making the volume unique in its coverage. The volume will appeal to students and scholars whose interest lies in the acquisition and processing of syntax with a particular focus on complex sentences in crosslinguistic and functionalist perspective.
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Content
- The Acquisition of Relative Clauses
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Table of contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction: The acquisition of relative clauses
- References
- 1. Relative clauses
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Emergentism
- 3. The syntax of relative clauses
- 4. The processing of relative clauses
- Prominence
- The distance between filler and gap
- Chinese
- Japanese and Korean
- Summary
- 5. The acquisition of relative clauses
- The path problem
- The closure problem
- 6. Concluding remarks
- References
- 2. A connectionist account of the acquisition and processing of relative clauses
- 1. Introduction
- 2. The relative clause accessibility hierarchy
- 2.1 The accessibility hierarchy in development
- 3. Modeling the acquisition of relative clauses
- 3.1 Language and method
- 3.2 Modeling results
- 4. From acquisition to adult processing
- 4.1 Experience and relative clauses processing
- 5. Conclusion
- References
- 3. Learning from social interaction
- 1. Introduction
- 1.1 Development of linguistic constructions in usage-based and constructivist approaches: Chunks, schemas, and prototypes
- 2. Form and function of relative clauses in adult-adult interactions
- 3. Form and function of relative clauses in child-adult interactions
- 3.1 A cross-linguistic comparison of subject and object RCs in children's and adults' speech
- 3.2 A cross-linguistic comparison of the head NPs in children's and adults' RC constructions
- 3.3 A cross-linguistic comparison of the function of RCs in children's and adults' speech
- 4. Experimental evidence for relative-clause chunks and prototypes
- 4.1 Propositional complexity
- 4.2 Similarity to simple main clauses
- 4.3 Linguistic and semantic context of subject and object RCs
- 5. New focus on function
- 6. Conclusion
- References
- 4. Relative clause acquisition in Hebrew and the learning of constructions
- Introduction
- Relative clauses in Hebrew
- The developmental path of relative clauses in Hebrew
- Production
- The corpus
- Coding
- Results and discussion
- How adult-like are children's relative clauses?
- How does the construction develop over time?
- Comprehension
- Input patterns and gender agreement
- Method
- Results and discussion
- Integrating multiple cues
- What early constructions look like and how they develop over time
- Conclusions
- References
- 5. Finnish
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Relative clauses in Finnish
- What we know about RC acquisition based on observational studies
- Method
- Corpus
- Searches
- Coding
- Results
- Relative clauses in Piia's speech
- Discussion
- The head referent
- Centre-embedding
- The syntactic role of the relativized element
- The number of relative clauses in the Finnish data
- Conclusion
- References
- 6. Learning to produce Quechua relative clauses
- Introduction
- Quechua nominalized relative clauses
- Questions and issues
- Production of externally-headed, internally-headed, and free relatives
- Ease of production of relative clauses according to the function of the relativized Noun Phrase
- Nominalizing morphology in Quechua relative clauses
- The elicitation procedure
- Errors
- Conversions
- Heads
- Cusco Quechua relative clauses
- Nominalizations
- Finite structures
- Well-formed relative clauses
- Heads
- Subject-gap free relatives
- Object-gap externally headed relatives
- Conclusion
- References
- Appendix I: Protocols - Conchucos Quechua (Study #1)
- Appendix II: Protocols - Cusco Quechua (Study #2)
- 7. The acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Characteristics of Japanese relative clauses
- 3. Acquisition studies: Structural aspects
- 4. Acquisition studies: The semantic-functional aspects
- Research background
- Stativity of relative clauses
- Head nouns
- Contexts in which relative clauses are used
- Input
- 5. General discussion
- References
- 8. The acquisition of relative clauses in Cantonese and Mandarin
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Chinese relative clauses
- 3. Prenominal RCs and competing processing demands in acquisition
- 3.1 Processing demands based on linear order: The case of English
- 3.2 Processing demands based on hierarchical sentence structure: The case of English
- 3.3 The noun phrase accessibility hierarchy
- 3.4 Processing demands based on linear order: The case of Chinese
- 3.5 Processing demands based on hierarchical sentence structure: The case of Chinese
- 3.6 Subject/object asymmetry in the acquisition of Chinese
- 4. Cantonese object classifier RCs as internally headed RCs
- 4.1 Possibility of an internally headed analysis in early Cantonese object relatives
- 5. Chinese RCs as a subset of noun-modifying constructions
- 6. Concluding remarks
- References
- 9. Structural priming in comprehension of relative clause sentences
- Method
- Participants
- Materials
- Procedure
- Results
- Structure analysis
- Prime x structure analyses
- Eliminating the subject-object asymmetry
- Discussion
- References
- Index
