Relative Clauses in Cantonese-English Bilingual Children

Typological Challenges and Processing Motivations

Bibliographic Data

ID5823973
AuthorsVirginia Yip (0000-0002-0164-3484, Chinese University of Hong Kong), Stephen Matthews (0000-0001-7683-8051, University of Hong Kong)
Year2007
Volume29
Issue02
Publication date2007-04-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueStudies in Second Language Acquisition (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0272-2631 • E-ISSN: 1470-1545
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0272263107070143
OpenAlexW2099108017
LanguageEN
Citations received35
References cited24

Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or simultaneously with subject relatives, and in their English, prenominal relatives based on Cantonese emerged first, with object relatives followed by subject relatives. These findings are discussed in light of findings on the typology and acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and the underlying processing motivations of the NPAH. Prenominal object relatives in the bilingual children's Cantonese and English have the same word order as main clauses and can be analyzed as internally headed RCs. The reconceptualization of RCs as attributive clauses (Comrie, 1998a, 1998b, 2002) is supported by children's early RCs lacking a strict grammatical relationship between the head noun and the predicate. Furthermore, as observed by Diessel and Tomasello (2000, 2005) for English, bilingual children's earliest RCs consist of isolated noun phrases (NPs). The early object relatives produced by bilingual children are therefore essentially NPs with the linear order of a main clause, resulting in a configuration that is conducive to early production.We thank Yasuhiro Shirai for organizing the workshop on second language acquisition of RCs at Cornell University in January 2006, where this paper was presented, as well as for his valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. We thank all the participants at the workshop and two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their comments. Additional feedback offered by William O'Grady, Salikoko Mufwene, and John Whitman is greatly appreciated and hereby acknowledged. We thank our children for their contributions to this paper and all of the members of our research team who have contributed to this work-in particular, Uta Lam for her technical assistance. This research has been fully supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project Nos. HKU336/94H, CUHK4002/97H, CUHK4014/02H, and CUHK 4692/05H) and direct grants from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (01/02, 03/04

Attributive · English grammar · Genitive case · Relative clause · Word order · Language Development and Disorders · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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