title: How do language-specific characteristics affect the acquisition of different relative clause types? Evidence from Finnish.
abstract: We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested children's comprehension of subject, object, and two types of oblique relatives. No difference was found in the children's performance on different structures, including a lack of previously widely reported asymmetry between subject and object relatives. However, children's comprehension was modulated by animacy of the head referent. Study 3 tested children's production of the same RC structures using sentence repetition. Again we found no subject-object asymmetry. The pattern of results suggested that distributional frequency patterns and the relative complexity of the relativizer contribute to the difficulty associated with particular RC structures.
authors.affiliation: University of Manchester,UK.
authors.forename: Minna
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kirjavainen
authors.affiliation: Australian National University,Australia.
authors.forename: Evan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kidd
authors.affiliation: University of Manchester,UK.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lieven
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D005387:Finland; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male