The syntax and the function of Chinese relative clauses have been a hot issue in linguistic studies, given that typologically modifiers of nominals rarely occur before a demonstrative (cf. Greenberg 1963, Cinque 2005), and yet pre-demonstrative relative clauses are common in Chinese. This paper presents an analysis of syntax and information structure of Chinese relative clauses and shows result...

ABSTRACT---Previous psycholinguistic studies on the processing of relative clauses delineate the importance of working memory in sentence comprehension. This study further investigates the role of working memory in the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses by dyslexic children who have reading and writing difficulties in Chinese. In this study, a computerized sentence listening and reading ...

The predictions of two contrasting approaches to the acquisition of transitive relative clauses were tested within the same groups of German-speaking participants aged from 3 to 5 years old. The input frequency approach predicts that object relative clauses with inanimate heads (e.g., the pullover that the man is scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with an animat...

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive...

It is widely accepted that the split between restrictive and nonrestrictive relatives generally coincides with their asymmetric contribution to discourse: restrictive relatives contribute content that is part of the main assertion of the sentence, while nonrestrictive relatives contribute content that is backgrounded or supplementary to the content of the main clause. Recent studies (Huddleston...

There is still much debate about the nature of the experiential and maturational changes that take place during childhood to bring about the sophisticated language abilities of an adult. The present study investigated text exposure as a possible source of linguistic experience that plays a role in the development of adult-like language abilities. Corpus analyses of object and passive relative c...