Asymmetries in children's production of relative clauses: data from English and Korean. Issue 5 (12th August 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: KIM, CHAE-EUN; O'GRADY, WILLIAM
• Is Part Of: Journal of child language. Volume 43:Issue 5(2016)
• Page Start: 1038
• Page End: 1071
• Publication Date: 2015-08-12
• Subjects: Children -- Language -- Periodicals; 401.9305
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000915000422
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0305-0009

Abstract

ABSTRACT: We report here on a series of elicited production experiments that investigate the production of indirect object and oblique relative clauses by monolingual child learners of English and Korean. Taken together, the results from the two languages point toward a pair of robust asymmetries: children manifest a preference for subject relative clauses over indirect object relative clauses, and for direct object relative clauses over oblique relative clauses. We consider various possible explanations for these preferences, of which the most promising seems to involve the requirement that the referent of the head noun be easily construed as what the relative clause is about.