Chapter 6
Relative clauses and intervention effects
Does the person feature matter?
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the presence of pronoun elements as
intervening subjects in the elicitation of object relative clauses (ORCs) by children and adults (as a control group).
It has been argued that the presence of a full DP intervening subject in ORCs brings difficulties for young children
and that a significant improvement is obtained when the intervening subject lacks a lexical restriction. In this
study, the elicitation of subject RCs, ORCs displaying a full DP, ORCs displaying third person pronouns, and ORCs
displaying second person pronouns is contrasted. It is hypothesized that the person feature plays a role in helping to
distinguish the moved object from the intervening subject and subsequently producing ORCs with first or second
pronouns should be facilitated. Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers participated in the study: 14 younger 4-year-old
children; 14 older 6-year-old children; and 21 adults. Results show better performance for ORCs displaying second
person pronouns, suggesting that the person feature matters. Alternative and non-adequate responses are evaluated. So
far, adults appear, despite the presence of a lexical restriction, to mostly benefit from the presence of an indexical
pronoun as intervener, and children demonstrate a developmental trend in the same direction; it seems that processing
capacities as an explanatory hypothesis are at stake.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Intervention effects in ORCs
- 3.Method
- 3.1Research questions
- 3.2Participants
- 3.3Materials and design
- 3.4Procedure
- 4.Results and discussion
- 5.Mismatch of features and the role of the person feature
- 6.Final remarks
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Notes
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References
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Appendix