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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 2–19

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Chapter 1
Featural mismatches and the comprehension of relative clauses in French

Comparing gender and number

 | University of Konstanz
 | University of Siena
 | Collège de France
 | University of Fribourg
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Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.01ben
Abstract
Children’s difficulties with object relatives, linked to intervention effects (Friedmann et al. 2009), can be modulated by finer-grained featural mismatches between the moved object and the embedded subject. We investigated the effect of gender and number featural mismatches and the role of audible verb agreement in number on the comprehension of relative clauses in French. Our findings show that a mismatch in number, but not in gender, modulates intervention effects in French object relatives. This follows from the featural intervention account (Belletti et al. 2012), because only number acts as attractor for movement in French. We also show that audibility of number agreement on the verbal morphology does not affect comprehension, as expected under an abstract feature-based approach to intervention.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The study
    • Participants
    • Method and materials
  • Results
    • Study 1 (effect of gender mismatch)
    • Study 2 (effect of number mismatch)
  • Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (34)
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