Grammatical description versus configurational arrangement in language acquisition: the case of relative clauses in Japanese.

The description o f sentence complexity in terms o f grammatical relations or in terms o f configurational properties o f their surface structure is a basic issue in developmental psycholinguistics. The problem has been investigated in English, but these studies provide little insight because o f the peculiar properties of word order in the language. A series o f experiments with Japanese children is reported in which the configurational demands of the sentence are shown to be the critical factor.