Persian speaking children's acquisition of relative clauses

Rahmany, R., Marefat, H., & Kidd, E. (2011). Persian speaking children's acquisition of relative clauses. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8(3), 367-388. doi:10.1080/17405629.2010.509056.
The current study examined the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Persian is a relatively unique data point in crosslinguistic research in acquisition because it is a head-final language with post-nominal RCs. Children (N = 51) aged 2 to 7 years completed a picture-selection task that tested their comprehension of subject-, object-, and genitive-RCs. The results showed that the children experienced greater difficulty processing object and genitive RCs when compared to subject RCs, suggesting that the children have particular difficulty processing sentences with non-canonical word order. The results are discussed with reference to a number of theoretical accounts proposed to account for sentence difficulty.
Publication type
Journal article
Publication date
2011

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