Object relatives made easy: A cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children's processing of relative clauses
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We present the results from four studies, two corpora and two experimental, which suggest that English- and German-speaking children (3;1–4;9 years) use multiple constraints to process and produce object relative clauses. Our two corpora studies show that children produce object relatives that reflect the distributional and discourse regularities of the input. Specifically, the results show that when children produce object relatives they most often do so with (a) an inanimate head noun, and (b) a pronominal relative clause subject. Our experimental findings show that children use these constraints to process and produce this construction type. Moreover, when children were required to repeat the object relatives they most often use in naturalistic speech, the subject-object asymmetry in processing of relative clauses disappeared. We also report cross-linguistic differences in children's rate of acquisition which reflect properties of the input language. Overall, our results suggest that children are sensitive to the same constraints on relative clause processing as adults.
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- Authors
- Kidd, E., Brandt, S., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M.
- Affiliations
- Max Planck Society (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Kidd, Evan
- Venue
- Language and Cognitive Processes
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2007-09
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 860-897
- ISSN
- 0169-0965 (ISSN-L)
- 1464-0732
- OpenAlex
- W2141221518
- Cited by
- 196
- References
- 66
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 13 · 2015: 18 · 2014: 15 · 2013: 11 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 13.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Licence
- other-oa
- Locations
- Language and Cognitive Processes (publishedVersion)
- Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) (publishedVersion)
- Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (submittedVersion)
- Lancaster EPrints (Lancaster University) (submittedVersion)
- Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Keywords
- object relative clauses, relative clause processing, child language acquisition, cross-linguistic comparison, English-German comparison, subject-object asymmetry, distributional constraints, discourse constraints, child language production
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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