TY - JOUR
T1 - Rethinking child difficulty
T2 - The effect of NP type on children's processing of relative clauses in Hebrew
AU - Arnon, Inbal
PY - 2010/1
Y1 - 2010/1
N2 - Children find object relative clauses difficult. They show poor comprehension that lags behind production into their fifth year. This finding has shaped models of relative clause acquisition, with appeals to processing heuristics or syntactic preferences to explain why object relatives are more difficult than subject relatives. Two studies here suggest that children (age 4 ; 6) do not find all object relatives difficult: a corpus study shows that children most often hear and produce object relatives with pronominal subjects. But they are most often tested on ones with lexical-NP subjects (e.g. The nurse that the girl is drawing). When tested on object relatives with pronominal subjects (e.g. The nurse that I am drawing), similar to those they actually hear and produce, Hebrew speakers aged 4 ; 6 show good comprehension (85% accuracy) that matches their production ability. This suggests a different path of relative clause acquisition, one that is sensitive to fine-grained distributional information.
AB - Children find object relative clauses difficult. They show poor comprehension that lags behind production into their fifth year. This finding has shaped models of relative clause acquisition, with appeals to processing heuristics or syntactic preferences to explain why object relatives are more difficult than subject relatives. Two studies here suggest that children (age 4 ; 6) do not find all object relatives difficult: a corpus study shows that children most often hear and produce object relatives with pronominal subjects. But they are most often tested on ones with lexical-NP subjects (e.g. The nurse that the girl is drawing). When tested on object relatives with pronominal subjects (e.g. The nurse that I am drawing), similar to those they actually hear and produce, Hebrew speakers aged 4 ; 6 show good comprehension (85% accuracy) that matches their production ability. This suggests a different path of relative clause acquisition, one that is sensitive to fine-grained distributional information.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77449101215&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S030500090900943X
DO - 10.1017/S030500090900943X
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C2 - 19327196
AN - SCOPUS:77449101215
SN - 0305-0009
VL - 37
SP - 27
EP - 57
JO - Journal of Child Language
JF - Journal of Child Language
IS - 1
ER -