The role of resumptive pronouns in Cantonese relative clause acquisition

Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examine...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:First language 2016-08, Vol.36 (4), p.355-382
Main Author: Lau, Elaine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cantonese
Child Language
Children
Comprehension
Control Groups
Error Analysis (Language)
Experimental Groups
Experiments
Foreign Countries
Form Classes (Languages)
Hong Kong
Kindergarten
Language Acquisition
Language Usage
Learning Strategies
Monolingualism
Native language acquisition
Pronouns
Reading Comprehension
Reading Tests
Relative clauses
Sino Tibetan Languages
Statistical Analysis
Young Children
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examined whether the same pattern is found in Cantonese, a language that allows resumption as a legitimate relativization strategy. Young Cantonese monolingual children were tested for both comprehension and production of object relative clauses using different relativization strategies (the gap strategy vs. the resumptive pronoun strategy). Although children did not perform better on either strategy in comprehension, and never employed resumptive pronouns in their production, resumption did prevent misanalysis of prenominal relative clauses as matrix clauses, suggesting that these elements help reveal the full structure of the relative clause to the processor. The study also showed better performance on subject than on object relative clauses, suggesting that the widely observed subject–object asymmetry also applies to Cantonese.
ISSN:0142-7237
1740-2344
DOI:10.1177/0142723716648840