Children Don ’ t Like Restrictions : Evidence from the Acquisition of Object A ’ - dependencies in

Children’s difficulties with headed object A’-dependencies have been attributed, on the one hand, to the intervention of a structurally similar element (the subject) in the interpretive chain formed by the moved object with the gap, and on the other, to the incremental processing of these constructions. This study brings new evidence to show that structural similarity as a source of difficulty is overriden by semantic properties such as set-restriction and animacy, and that the processing of these properties relates to working memory capacities. 119 Frenchspeaking children were tested on the comprehension of object relative clauses and whquestions by using a character-selection task. Working memory was assessed through digitspan tasks. Results show significantly better performance for –Set-restricted object A’dependencies than for +Set-restricted ones across all age groups. The mismatch in animacy also modulates comprehension, but its effect becomes relevant only for the older children and in cases where the object is +Set-restricted. We argue that an analysis purely in terms of syntactic similarity cannot capture these effects. Moreover, the weaker effect of working memory on the accuracy of –Set-restriction structures shows that the soliciting of working memory resources depends on the nature of the disambiguating information.