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Article published In: Processing in Bilingual Children
Edited by Chantal van Dijk, Jasmijn E. Bosch and Sharon Unsworth
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 14:4] 2024
► pp. 446–475

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Bilingual children’s online processing of relative clauses

Evidence from heritage Greek

ORCiD logo with link | University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
ORCiD logo with link | University of Cologne
ORCiD logo with link | University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
Published online: 18 April 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.22103.kat
Abstract
Long-distance dependencies such as relative clauses (RCs) are known to be vulnerable in heritage grammars (e.g., Montrul, S. A. (2008). Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism: Re-examining the Age Factor. John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Previous studies in RC comprehension have shown that heritage language (HL) children show similar comprehension to monolingual children ( (2020). The acquisition of relative clauses by Mandarin heritage language children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 10(2), 153–183. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), while differential performance has also been found (Kidd, E., Chan, A., & Chiu, J. (2015). Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children’s comprehension of relative clauses. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(3), 438–452. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The present study investigates 11–13-year-old monolingual and German-dominant HL children’s real-time parsing strategies in subject relative clause (SRC) and object relative clause (ORC) processing in Greek. We conducted a self-paced listening task in Greek in which we manipulated the type of RC (subject vs. object), and the RC internal word order (canonical vs. scrambled). Our analyses revealed no significant group differences between HL and monolingual children. Both groups of children processed SRCs faster than ORCs on the critical RC verb segment. We also examined if case-marked pre-verbal NPs would facilitate the processing of ORC structures. Although children processed pre-verbal faster than post-verbal NPs, ORC structures with pre-verbal NPs received the lowest scores in the grammaticality judgment task. We discuss these findings on the grounds of Relativized Minimality (Friedmann, N., Belletti, A., & Rizzi, L. (2009). Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua, 119(1), 67–88. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and Fodor, J. D., & Inoue, A. (2000). Syntactic features in reanalysis: Positive and negative symptoms. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(1), 25–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar Diagnosis and Repair Model.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1On the SRC vs. ORC processing asymmetry
    • 1.2RC processing in HL children
    • 1.3Relative clause comprehension in Greek
  • 2.The present study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Assessing HL children’s vocabulary and grammatical knowledge
      • 3.2.1Vocabulary: Peabody picture vocabulary test (PPVT)
      • 3.2.2Reception of grammar – German version of TROG
      • 3.2.3Reception of grammar – Greek developmental verbal intelligence quotient (DVIQ)
      • 3.2.4Reception of grammar results: German TROG-D and Greek DVIQ
      • 3.2.5Self-paced listening task
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Pre-processing of the self-paced listening task data
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Self-paced listening task
    • 4.2Grammaticality judgments
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Competing interests
  • Data availability
  • Notes
  • References
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