Grammatical feature dissimilarities make relative clauses easier: A comprehension study with Italian children

Lingua

Volumn 120, Issue 9, 2010, Pages 2148-2166

  Adani, Flavia ^a,c   van der Lely, Heather K J ^b   Forgiarini, Matteo ^a   Guasti, Maria Teresa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MILANO BICOCCA   (Italy)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF POTSDAM   (Germany)

Author keywords

Gender; Italian acquisition; Number; Relative clause comprehension

Indexed keywords

EID: 77953122925     PISSN: 00243841     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2010.03.018     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. Abney S.P. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect (1987), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
2. Adani, F., 2008. The role of features in relative clause comprehension: a study of typical and atypical development. Unpublished PhD dissertation University Milano-Bicocca.
3. Adani, F., 2010. Re-thinking the acquisition of relative clauses: towards a grammatically-based account. Journal of Child Language.
4. Alexiadou A., Haegeman L., and Stavrou M. Noun Phrase in the Generative Perspective (2007), Mouton de Grutyer, Berlin
5. Antòn-Méndez I., Nicol J.L., and Garrett M.F. The relation between gender and number agreement processing. Syntax 5 1 (2002) 1-25
6. Arnon I. Relative clause acquisition in hebrew: towards a processing-oriented account. Paper Presented at the Boston University Child Language Development. Boston (2005)
7. Arnon, I., 2009. Rethinking child difficulty: the effect of np type on children's processing of relative clauses in hebrew, Journal of Child Language, 1-31.
8. Arosio F., Adani F., and Guasti M.T. Processing grammatical features by Italian children. In: Brucart J.M., Gavarrò A., and Sola J. (Eds). Merging Features: Computation, Interpretation, and Acquisition (2009), Oxford University Press
9. Baker M. The mirror principle and morphosyntactic explanation. Linguistic Inquiry 16 (1985) 373-415
10. Barber H., and Carreiras M. Grammatical gender and number agreement in Spanish: an erp comparison. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17 1 (2005) 137-153
11. Bernstein J.B. The dp hypothesis: identifying clausal properties in the nominal domain. In: Baltin M., and Collins C. (Eds). The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory (2001), Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 536-561
12. Bianchi V. Consequences of Antysymmetry: Headed Relative Clauses (1999), Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin
13. Booth J.R., Mac Whinney B., and Harasaki Y. Developmental differences in visual and auditory processing of complex sentences. Child Development 71 4 (2000) 981-1003
14. Caramazza A., and Zurif E.B. Comprehension of complex sentences in children and aphasics: a test of the regression hypothesis. In: Caramazza A., and Zurif E.B. (Eds). Language Acquisition and Language Breakdown (1978), John Hopkins, UP
15. Carminati M.N. Processing reflexes of the feature hierarchy (person>number>gender) and implications for the linguistic theory. Lingua 115 (2005) 259-285
16. Chilosi A.M., Cipriani P., Giorgi A., Fazzi B., and Pfanner L. Test di Comprensione Grammaticale Per i Bambini (1995), Edizioni del Cerro, Pisa
17. Chomsky N. Syntactic Structures (1957), The Hague, Mouton
18. Chomsky N. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
19. Chomsky N. The Minimalist Program (1995), MIT Press, Cambrigde, MA
20. Chomsky N. Minimalist inquiries. In: Martin R., Michaels D., and Uriagereka J. (Eds). Step by Step: Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik vol. 3 (2000), MIT Press, Cambridge 89-155
21. Chomsky N., and Miller G.A. Introduction to the formal analysis of natural languages. In: Luce R.D., Bush R.R., and Galanter E. (Eds). Handbook of Mathematical Psychology vol. 2 (1963), Wiley, New York 269-321
22. Clifton Jr. C., and Frazier L. Comprehending sentences with long distance dependencies. In: Carlson G., and Tanenhaus M. (Eds). Linguistic Structure in Language Processing (1989), Kluwer, Dordrecht: The Netherlands 273-317
23. Corbett G.G. Gender (1991), Cambridge University Press
24. Corbett G.G. Agreement (2006), Cambridge University Press
25. Corrêa L.M.S. An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 24 3 (1995) 183-203
26. Crain S., McKee C., and Emiliani M. Visiting relatives in Italy. In: Frazier L., and Villiers J.D. (Eds). Language Processing and Language Acquisition (1990), Kluwer, Dordrecht
27. Crain S., Ni W., and Shankweiler D. Grammatism. Brain & Language 77 (2001) 294-304
28. de Villiers J.G., Tager Flusberg H.B., Hakuta K., and Cohen M. Children's comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 8 5 (1979) 499-518
29. De Vincenzi M. Syntactic Parsing Strategies in Italian: The Minimal Chain Principle, vol. 12 (1990), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London
30. De Vincenzi M., and Di Domenico E. A distinction among phi-features: the role of gender and number in the retrivial of pronoun antecedents. Italian Journal of Linguistics 11 1 (1999)
31. Di Domenico E. Per Una Teoria del Genere Grammaticale (1997), Unipress, Padova
32. Diessel H., and Tomasello M. The development of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech. Cognitive Linguistics 11 1/2 (2000) 131-151
33. Frazier L., and Fodor J.D. The sausage machine: a new two-stage parsing model. Cognition 6 (1978) 235-291
34. Friedmann N., Belletti A., and Rizzi L. Relativized relatives. Types of intervention in the acquisition of a-bar dependencies. Lingua 119 (2009) 67-88
35. Friedmann N., and Novogrodsky R. The acquisition of relative clause comprehension in hebrew: a study of sli and normal development. Journal of Child Language 31 (2004) 661-681
36. Garraffa M., and Grillo N. Canonicity effects as grammatical phenomena. Journal of Neurolinguistics 21 (2008) 177-197
37. Gennari S.P., and MacDonald M.C. Linking production and comprehension processes: the case of relative clauses. Cognition 111 (2009) 1-23
38. Gibson E. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68 (1998) 1-76
39. Goodluck H., and Tavakolian S.L. Competence and processing in children's grammar of relative clauses. Cognition 11 (1982) 1-27
40. Gordon P., Hendrick R., and Johnson M. Effects of noun phrase type on sentence complexity. Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 97-114
41. Gordon P.C., Hendrick R., and Johnson M. Memory interference during language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 27 (2001) 1411-1423
42. Grant J., Valian V., and Karmiloff-Smith A. A study of relative clauses in Williams syndrome. Journal of Child Language 29 02 (2002) 403-416
43. Greenberg J.H. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In: Greenberg J.H. (Ed). Universals of Language (1967), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 73-113
44. Grillo, N., 2005. Minimality effects in agrammatic comprehension. Paper presented at the ConSOLE XIII.
45. Grillo N. Generalized minimality: feature impoverishment and comprehension deficits in agrammatism. Lingua 119 (2009) 1426-1443
46. Håkansson G., and Hansson K. Comprehension and production of relative clauses: a comparison between Swedish impaired and unimpaired children. Journal of Child Language 27 (2000) 313-333
47. Hamburger H., and Crain S. Relative acquisition. In: Kuczaj S. (Ed). Language development, vol. 1: Syntax and semantics (1982), Erlbaum, Hillsdale: NJ
48. Harley H., and Ritter E. In: Weise H., and Simon H. (Eds). Structuring the Bundle: A Universal Morphosyntactic Feature Geometry (2000), Elsevier Press, Pronous
49. Harris J.W. The exponence of gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry 22 (1991) 27-62
50. Kayne R. The Antisymmetry of Syntax (1994), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
51. Kidd E., and Bavin E.L. English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 31 6 (2002) 599-617
52. Liang K.Y., and Zeger S.L. Longitudinal data analysis using generalized linear models. Biometrika 73 (1986) 13-22
53. Mak W.M., Vonk W., and Schriefers H. The influence of animacy on relative clause processing. Journal of Memory and Language 47 1 (2002) 50
54. Mak W.M., Vonk W., and Schriefers H. Animacy in processing relative clauses: the hikers that rocks crush. Journal of Memory and Language 54 4 (2006) 466
55. Morin J.-Y. A morphological convergence between liason and schwa deletion in the picard and walloon dialects of french. In: Andersen H. (Ed). Sandhi Phenomena in the Languages of Europe (1986), Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin 211-222
56. Nicol, J.L., 1988. Coreference processing during sentence comprehension. PhD Dissertation: MIT.
57. Novrogodsky R., and Friedmann N. The production of relative clauses in syntactic-sli: a window to the nature of the impairment. Advances in Speech-Language Pathology 8 4 (2006) 364-375
58. Ozge, D., Marinis, T., Zeyrek, D., 2009. Comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in monolingual turkish children. Paper presented at the 14th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics.
59. Picallo M.C. Nominals and nominalization in catalan. Probus 3 (1991) 279-316
60. Picallo M.C. Gender and number in romance. Lingue e Linguaggio 1 (2008) 47-66
61. Reali F., and Christiansen M.H. Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence. Journal of Memory and Language 57 (2007) 1-23
62. Ritter E. Two functional categories in noun phrases: evidence from modern hebrew. Syntax and Semantics 25 (1991) 37-62
63. Ritter E. Where's gender?. Linguistic Inquiry 24 (1993) 795-803
64. Rizzi L. Relativized Minimality, vol. 16 (1990), MIT Press
65. Rizzi, L. (2000). Reconstruction, weak island sensitivity, and agreement. Unpublished manuscript, CISCL University of Siena.
66. Rizzi L. Locality and left periphery. In: Belletti A. (Ed). Structure and Beyond (2004), Oxford University Press, New York 223-251
67. Schneider, W., Eschman, A., Zuccolotto, A., 2002a. E-prime reference guide.
68. Schneider W., Eschman A., and Zuccolotto A. E-prime User's Guide (2002), Psychology Software Tools Inc., Pittsburgh
69. Sheldon A. The role of parallel functions in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 13 (1974) 272-281
70. Slobin D. Developmental psycholinguistics. In: Dingwall W.O. (Ed). A Survey of Linguistic Science (1971), University of Maryland ed.
71. Starke, M., 2001. Move dissolves into merge: a theory of locality. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
72. Stavrakaki S. Comprehension of reversible relative clauses in specifically language impaired and normally developing Greek children. Brain and Language 77 (2001) 419-431
73. Stavrakaki S. A-bar movement constructions in Greek children with sli: evidence for deficits in the syntactic component of language. In: Fava E. (Ed). Clinical Linguistics: Theory and Applications in Speech Pathology and Therapy (2002), John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia 131-153
74. Stella G., Pizzoli C., and Tressoldi P.E. Test di Vocabolario Recettivo (2000), Peabody
75. Tavakolian S.L. The conjoined-clause analysis of relative clauses. In: Tavakolian S.L. (Ed). Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory (1981), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
76. Traxler M.J., Morris R.K., and Seely R.E. Processing of subject and object relative clauses: evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language 47 (2002) 69-90
77. Utzeri, I., 2007. The production and acquisition of subject and object relative clauses in Italian: a comparative experimental study. Paper presented at the Nanzan Linguistics 2: Research Results and Activities 2007.
78. Van Dyke J.A. Interference effects from grammatically unavailable constituents during sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 33 2 (2007) 407-430
79. Van Dyke J.A., and Lewis R.L. Distinguishing effects of structure and decay on attachment and repair: a cue-based parsing account of recovery from misanalyzed ambiguities. Journal of Memory and Language 49 3 (2003) 285-316
80. Van Dyke J.A., and McElree B. Retrieval interference in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 55 (2006) 157-166
81. Vergnaud J.-R. French Relative Clauses (1974), MIT
82. Warren T., and Gibson E. The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity. Cognition 85 (2002) 79-112
83. Warren T., and Gibson E. Effects of np-type on reading English clefts. Language and Cognitive Processes 20 6 (2005) 751-767
84. Zukowski A. Elicited production of relative clauses in children with Williams syndrome. Language and Cognitive Processes 24 1 (2008) 1-43