The acquisition of relative clauses and noun phrase accessibility
Testing the NPAH in Cantonese
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21746306 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elaine Lau (0000-0002-5801-6705, Yew Chung College of Early Childhood Education, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 214-234 |
| Publication date | 2025-04-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language Learning and Development (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1547-3341 • E-ISSN: 1547-5441 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/15475441.2024.2429042 |
| OpenAlex | W4405813842 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NAPH) posits a subject advantage in extraction from relative clauses and other constructions – a claim supported by numerous cross-linguistic language acquisition studies. However, Chinese languages differ from the majority of the languages hitherto studied in having SVO (head-initial) word order and prenominal relative clauses, a typologically peculiar combination that provides the opportunity to tease apart predictions of various theories of relative clauses. This study uses Cantonese in an experiment on children’s comprehension of relative clauses to investigate the effects of NP accessibility using pair-wise comparisons across the NP positions of subject, direct object, indirect object, and oblique. The results strongly support a universal subject preference and also support, to some extent, the NPAH’s predictions for the acquisition order of relative clauses. In addition, children’s errors reveal a multifactorial influence, suggesting that their processing of relative clauses is affected by semantic prominence and word order canonicity
Determiner phrase · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Noun · Noun phrase · Phrase · Phrase structure rules · Relative clause · Computer Science · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Text Readability and Simplification · Artificial Intelligence
Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Individual differences in syntactic processing
Linguistic complexity
Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure
Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4
The subject advantage in relative clauses
Four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children’s online comprehension of relative clauses
Young children’s production of head-final relative clauses
Four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of relative clauses
The acquisition of Chinese relative clauses
The role of resumptive pronouns in Cantonese relative clause acquisition
On the universality of the subject preference in the acquisition of relative clauses across languages
Syntactic processing
Cognition and the Development of Language
Effects of Age and Location in Chinese Relative Clauses Processing
Linguistic theory and psychological reality
Subject prominence and processing dependencies in prenominal relative clauses
A New Look at the Acquisition of Relative Clauses
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |