English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development.
Children must possess some ability to process input in a meaningful manner to acquire language. The present study reports on data from an experiment investigating 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking children's understanding of restrictive relative clauses manipulated for embeddedness and focus. The results of the study showed that English-speaking children acquire right-branching before center-embedded structures. Comparisons made with data from Portuguese-speaking children suggest general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development, and with respect to English, a "clause expansion" approach to processing in development.
Kidd
Evan
E
School of Psychological Science, Faculty of Science, Technology, and Engineering, La Trobe University, Victoria 3086, Australia. e.kidd@latrobe.edu.au
Bavin
Edith L
EL
D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception