How do language-specific characteristics affect the acquisition of different relative clause types? Evidence from Finnish

Kirjavainen, Minna; Kidd, Evan; Lieven, Elena

Abstract

Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016. 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.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 18, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Jan 11, 2016
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: Apr 3, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 3, 2017
• Journal: Journal of Child Language
• Print ISSN: 0305-0009
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-7602
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 44
• Issue: 01
• Pages: 120-157
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000915000768
• Keywords: first language acquisition, relative clause acquisition, Finnish
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/899316
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000915000768
• Contract Date: Apr 3, 2017