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.

Citation

Kirjavainen, M., Kidd, E., & Lieven, E. (2017). How do language-specific characteristics affect the acquisition of different relative clause types? Evidence from Finnish. Journal of Child Language, 44(01), 120-157. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000915000768

• 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