English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development.

Full Abstract

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.

Learn Faster Today Improve your study skills

Author information

Author/s: Kidd, Evan (E); Bavin, Edith L (EL);

Affiliation: School of Psychological Science, Faculty of Science, Technology, and Engineering, La Trobe University, Victoria 3086, Australia. e.kidd(-atsign-)latrobe.edu.au

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Journal of psycholinguistic research (J Psycholinguist Res), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Nov; vol 31 (issue 6) : pp 599-617

Dates: Created 2003/02/25; Completed 2003/05/01; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12599916, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

External Links for this article (including full text providers, if available):

Click Electronic Full-text Provider Links to see options for finding the electronic full text links to this article. Note there may be a subscription or fee required for access to the full text. See our FAQ for information on finding FREE full text articles.

This article may also be located in paper journal collections available in many libraries. Use the Journal and Publication Information above to find the full article.

MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

This article has not been indexed for related articles as yet, however you can still use the live related article search links below.

See 100+ related articles.