Child and adult construal of restrictive relative clauses: Knowledge of grammar and differential effects of syntactic context
Child and adult construal of restrictive relative clauses: Knowledge of grammar and differential effects of syntactic context
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限制性关系从句的儿童和成人解释：语法知识和句法上下文的差异效应
DOI：
10.1017/s0305000906007938
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发表时间：
2007
影响因子：
2.2
通讯作者：
Lindsay Heggie
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Cathy Fragman;H. Goodluck;Lindsay Heggie
我们报告了四个行动实验，测试成人和三至五岁的儿童之间的限制性和非限制性关系从句在英语中的区别的敏感性。具体来说，我们测试知识的事实，即限制性关系从句不能修改一个适当的名称头，并介绍了这一事实，亲属（而不是一个wh-代词）是强制性的限制。儿童和成人都表现出对这些属性的了解。没有发现支持的假设，儿童扩展块专有名称头的w-亲属。儿童和成人都对关系从句所处的句法语境（双宾语与存在句）敏感。然而，成人与儿童在四个方面不同。首先，在双宾语语境中，成年人比儿童更容易犯把that relative当作专名head的错误。第二，句法语境对中心语选择的影响，成人比儿童大。第三，句法语境对成人的影响与关系从句的类型存在交互作用，而对儿童则没有。第四，成人（而不是儿童）会受到他们是否在双宾语语境之前听到存在语境的影响。我们认为，三到四岁的儿童已经获得了类似成人的关系从句语法，我们看到的儿童和成人的表现差异可以归因于语法结合成熟（成人）或不成熟（儿童）的句子处理能力。
We report four act-out experiments testing the sensitivity of adults and three- to five-year-old children to the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in English. Specifically, we test knowledge of the fact that restrictive relative clauses cannot modify a proper name head, and of the fact that relatives introduced by that (as opposed to a wh-pronoun) are obligatorily restrictive. Both children and adults show knowledge of these properties. No support was found for the hypothesis that children extend the block on proper name heads to wh-relatives. Both children and adults are sensitive to the syntactic context (double object vs. existential) in which the relative clause is embedded. However, adults differ from children in four respects. First, in the double object context, adults are more likely than children to commit the error of construing a that relative as referring to a proper name head. Second, the effect of syntactic context on selection of a head is larger for adults than for children. Third, for adults, but not for children, the effect of syntactic context interacts with the type of relative clause. Fourth, adults, but not children, are influenced by whether they hear the existential context before the double object context. We propose that by three to four years of age children have acquired an adult-like grammar of relative clauses, and that the differences we see in child and adult performance can be attributed to that grammar in combination with a mature (adult) or immature (child) sentence processing capacity.