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Resumptive elements aid comprehension of object relative clauses: evidence from Persian*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2013

RAMIN RAHMANY ,
HAMIDEH MAREFAT  and
EVAN KIDD
RAMIN RAHMANY*
Affiliation:
University of Tehran
HAMIDEH MAREFAT
Affiliation:
University of Tehran
EVAN KIDD*
Affiliation:
Australian National University
*
Address for correspondence: Dr Ramin Rahmany, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Kargar Shomali Street, Tehran, IRAN. e-mail: ramin_rahmany@yahoo.com
Dr Evan Kidd, Research School of Psychology (Building 39), The Australian National University, Canberra 0200, AUSTRALIA. tel: +61 2 6125 2147; fax: +61 2 61250499; e-mail: evan.kidd@anu.edu.au
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Abstract

The current study investigated the role of resumption in the interpretation of object relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Sixty-four (N=64) children aged 3;2–6;0 (M=4;8) completed a referent selection task that tested their comprehension of subject RCs, gapped object RCs, and object RCs containing either a resumptive pronoun or an object clitic. The results showed that the presence of a resumptive element (pronoun or clitic) had a facilitative effect on children's processing of object RCs. In both cases object RCs with resumptive elements were interpreted more accurately than gapped subject and object RCs, suggesting that resumptive elements ease processing burden in syntactically complex contexts because they provide local cues to thematic role assignment.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , July 2014 , pp. 937 - 948
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was generously supported by a grant from the University of Tehran (grant # 4601011/1/5). We thank Inbal Arnon, Ludovica Serratrice, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.

References

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