When two cats are better than none: Children's interpretation of relative clauses (revisited)

Anna Weighall and Gerry Altmann
a.weighall@psych.york.ac.uk, g.altmann@psych.york.ac.uk
Dept. of Psychology, University of York

It is well established that young children have problems interpreting certain kinds of relative clause constructions;

(1)

'The cat that bumped the bear will hug the cow' (centre-embedded)

has been found to be easier to interpret (engenders fewer errors) than

(2)

'The cow will hug the cat that bumped the bear' (right-branching)

(e.g. Sheldon, 1974; Tavakolian, 1981). Previous research (using an act-out task) has demonstrated that the errors of interpretation found with the second of these structures can be diminished if these sentences are given to children in contexts that make the relative clause more referentially felicitous (Hamburger & Crain, 1982). Thus, in a context with several cats, the relative clause in sentence 2 can, in principle, pick out a particular cat. We shall report a series of studies in which we present 32 6-7 year olds with a static visual scene depicting, amongst other things, two cats just one of which bumps a bear, followed by a visual scene showing two cats and some other distractor animals. We monitored children's eye movements around this second scene as they listened to relative clause structures such as the examples given above. The child's task was to answer, subsequently, a simple question such as "what sort of animal bumped the bear". We manipulated both the kind of relative clause that the children heard, and the extent to which the first visual scene provided information that would make the subsequent relative clauses referentially felicitous. We found that children could integrate the referential information with the language, and utilise it, on-line, to support comprehension. Participants were more likely to move their eyes (and therefore their attention) to the intended cat as a function of how referentially felicitous the visual scene was. This pattern was mirrored in the offline data with significantly more correct answers being given when all the felicity conditions of the sentence were met. In contrast to earlier studies, which used the act-out task, we also found that children performed significantly better on sentences like 2 than 1. This is what would be predicted on the basis of adult data (e.g. Bates, Devescovi & D'Amico, 1999), and from studies using a revised version of the act-out out task (Kidd & Bavin, 2001) both of which suggest that embedded structures are more difficult to parse than their 'right-branching' counterparts. We suggest that the basic act-out task is confounded by performance factors and that when this is overcome it is evident that 6-7 year old children's processing of the relative clause is qualitatively similar to that of adults.

References

Bates, E. & Devescovi, A. & D'Amico, S. (1999). Processing complex sentences: A crosslinguistic study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 14, 69-123.

Hamburger, H. & Crain, S. (1982). Relative acquisition. In S. Kuczaj II (Ed), Language Development Vol. 1: Syntax and Semantics (pp 245-274). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Kidd, E. & Bavin, E. (submitted) English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: Evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

Sheldon, A. (1974). The role of parallel function in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 13, 272-281.

Tavakolian, S. L. (1981). The conjoined-clause analysis of relative clauses. In S. L. Tavakolian (Eds.), Language acquisition and linguistic theory. (pp. 167-187) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.