The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of psycholinguistic research, 2002
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.
Children's comprehension of relative clauses
Journal of psycholinguistic research, 1979
A review of the literature on children's use of relative clause constructions reveals many contradictory findings. The suggestion is that some studies fail to take into account the two factors of embeddedness (role of complex noun phrase within the sentence) and focus (role of head noun in the relative clause). The experiment reported here attempted to reconcile the disparate findings and extend the range of constructions examined. 114 children between the ages of 3 and 7 served as subjects in a test of comprehension using an act-out procedure of 9 different relative clause sentences that exhaust the possible combinations of 3 roles of the complex noun phrase in the sentence and 3 roles that the head noun plays within the relative clause (in each case, subject, direct object, and indirect object). All constructions were understood better with increasing age of the children; sex and sentence set were nonsignificant variables. The results reveal a difficulty in ordering of the 9 t...
Relative clauses that children understand: NP type effects on child processing
2006
Relative clauses (RCs) have been studied extensively in language acquisition and adult processing. Studies show that both children and adults find object relatives harder than subject relatives [1, 2]. Despite the similar pattern, adult difficulty is taken to reflect the increased processing demands of object relatives [1] while child difficulty is often interpreted as evidence for children's lack of adult-like knowledge of the structure, attributed to under-developed syntax [2] or to the use of non-adult processing heuristics which are ...
The role of memory in processing relative clauses in children with specific language impairment
American journal of speech-language pathology / American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2015
This study investigated the relationship between 2 components of memory--phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and working memory (WM)--and the control of relative clause constructions in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Children with SLI and 2 control groups--an age-matched and a younger group of children with typical development--repeated sentences, including relative clauses, representing 5 syntactic roles and 2 levels of matrix clause complexity. The Working Memory Test Battery for Children was administered. All 3 groups showed significant associations between pSTM and both types of matrix clause construction. For children with SLI, significant associations emerged between (a) WM and more complex matrix clause constructions, (b) WM and relative clauses including a range of syntactic roles, and (c) pSTM and the least difficult syntactic role. In contrast, the age-matched control group could repeat almost all syntactic roles without invoking the use of either memo...
Investigating relative clauses in children with specific language impairment
2011
Background: It is well documented that children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) experience significant grammatical deficits. While much of the focus in the past has been on their morphosyntactic difficulties, less is known about their acquisition of complex syntactic structures such as relative clauses. The role of memory in language performance has also become increasingly prominent in the literature. Aims: This study aims to investigate the control of an important complex syntactic structure, the relative clause, by school age children with SLI in Ireland, using a newly devised sentence recall task. It also aims to explore the role of verbal and short-term working memory in the performance of children with SLI on the sentence recall task, using a standardized battery of tests based on Baddeley’s model of working memory. Methods and Procedures: Thirty two children with SLI, thirty two age matched typically developing children (AM-TD) between the ages of 6 and 7,11 years and...
2016
Research on acquisition has established a clear asymmetry between subject (1) and object (2) A’-dependencies, with the former being mastered earlier than the latter (Avrutin, 2000, de Villiers, de Villiers, Hoban, 1994, Goodluck & Tavakolian, 1982, for English; Corrêa, 1995, Costa et. al, 2011, for Portuguese; Arnon, 2005, 2010, Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2004, for Hebrew; Adani et al., 2010, Adani, 2011, Arosio, Adani & Guasti, 2011, for Italian).