The impact of number mismatch and passives on the real-time processing of relative clauses

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 41; no. 3; pp. 658 - 689
• Main Authors: CONTEMORI, CARLA, MARINIS, THEODOROS
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.05.2014
• Subjects: Accuracy; Adults; Auditory processing; Biological and medical sciences; Child; Child development; Child Language; Children; Children & youth; Comparative Analysis; Comprehension; Developmental psychology; Ears & hearing; English; English language; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Grammatical agreement; Grammatical number; Humans; Information processing; Language acquisition; Language Development; Language Processing; Listening Comprehension; Male; Morphology; Morphology (Languages); Mothers; Native Language Acquisition; Nouns; Numbers; Psycholinguistics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time; Relative Clauses; Semantics; Sentences; Short Term Memory; Speech Perception; Verbs; United States > US; Human; English; School age; Language; Number; Information processing; Language development; Cognition; Syntax; Child
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000913000172

Language processing plays a crucial role in language development, providing the ability to assign structural representations to input strings (e.g., Fodor, 1998). In this paper we aim at contributing to the study of children's processing routines, examining the operations underlying the auditory processing of relative clauses in children compared to adults. English-speaking children (6;0–8;11) and adults participated in the study, which employed a self-paced listening task with a final comprehension question. The aim was to determine (i) the role of number agreement in object relative clauses in which the subject and object NPs differ in terms of number properties, and (ii) the role of verb morphology (active vs. passive) in subject relative clauses. Even though children's off-line accuracy was not always comparable to that of adults, analyses of reaction times results support the view that children have the same structural processing reflexes observed in adults.