Unit:
Κατεύθυνση ΓλωσσολογίαLibrary of the School of Philosophy
Supervisors info:
Σπυριδούλα Βαρλοκώστα, Καθηγητής, Φιλολογία, Φιλοσοφική Σχολή
Σπυρόπουλος Βασίλειος, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής, Φιλολογία, Φιλοσοφική Σχολή
Μαρκόπουλος Γιώργος, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής, Φιλολογία, Φιλοσοφική Σχολή
Original Title:
Αναφορικές Προτάσεις σε ελληνόφωνα παιδιά τυπικής ανάπτυξης
Translated title:
Relative Clauses in greek speaking typically developed children
Summary:
The late acquisition of Object Relative clauses (OR) in typically developing children has been explained by the theory of Relativized Minimality (RM, Rizzi, 1990) and the featural RM which focuses on the specific structure and similarity of the intervener and the head of the relative clause (Friedmann et al., 2009; Adani et al., 2010; Belletti et al., 2012 etc.). Based on the increased difficulty of object structures, we tested the comprehension of OR in 80 Greek-speaking children (of average age 6,4 years) and a control group of 20 adults, manipulating the match/mismatch of the intervener and the head of the relative clauses in gender, case and number. All three features were found significant for the accuracy. As expected, similarity in all three features seems to lead to less accurate comprehension. Gender and case were found significant in contrast to previous findings, which could be due to the different age of the samples. Further research could study the performance of all different developmental stages and determine the differences in the significance of features for each age. We propose that the difficulty in specific conditions can be explained by a combination of RM with processing accounts, since featural similarity seems to increase the processing costs of the sentences. This is further supported by the significant correlation found between the comprehension of OR and the fluid intelligence of the children.
Main subject category:
Language – Literature
Keywords:
psycholinguistics, relative clauses, typical development, object dependencies, Relativized Minimality, comprehension, phi features
Number of references:
133
