This chapter offers an emergentist perspective on the typology, processing, and acquisition of relative clauses. I begin by outlining the key tenets of an emergentist approach to language, and then offer a proposal for how the two major types of relative clause patterns found in the world’s languages (noun-first and noun-last) can be processed without reference to syntactic structure. Two factors in addition to frequency are identified as potential contributors to processing cost: prominence (the salience of the relativized element within the relative clause) and distance (the length of the filler-gap dependency holding between the head noun and the position at which it can be assigned a role within the relative clause). Differences in the relative influence of these factors in noun-first and noun-last languages are then linked to apparent differences in processing cost for subject and direct object relative clauses in the two language types. In the final part of this chapter, these differences are used to build a processing-based account for the acquisition of relative clauses, shedding light on the developmental course typical of this phenomenon in the first years of life.
2025. How Flexible Are Grammars Past Puberty? The Case of Relative Clauses in Turkish‐American Returnees. Language Learning
Tanaka, Nozomi, Elaine Lau & Alan L. F. Lee
2024. On the universality of the subject preference in the acquisition of relative clauses across languages. First Language 44:3 ► pp. 219 ff.
Zhang, Xiaopeng & Nan Gong
2024. Modeling effects of linguistic complexity on L2 processing effort: The case of eye movement in text reading. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 46:1 ► pp. 141 ff.
Lai, Jane, Angel Chan, Evan Kidd & Iftikhar Ahmed Khan
2023. Relative clause comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder. PLOS ONE 18:11 ► pp. e0288021 ff.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles & Hai Hu
2023. Linking Comprehension and Production: Frequency Distribution of Chinese Relative Clauses in the Sinica Treebank. In Chinese Language Resources [Text, Speech and Language Technology, 49], ► pp. 419 ff.
Tanaka, Nozomi & Alessia Cherici
2023. Subject Advantage in L1-English Learners’ Production of Chinese Relative Clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 52:2 ► pp. 405 ff.
Guijarro Sanz, María
2022. Fossilized mistakes in Spanish relative clauses learned by Chinese students. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 60:4 ► pp. 1227 ff.
Guijarro Sanz, María
2022. Fossilized mistakes in Spanish relative clauses learned by Chinese students. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 60:4 ► pp. 1227 ff.
Chan, Angel, Stephen Matthews, Nicole Tse, Annie Lam, Franklin Chang & Evan Kidd
2021. Revisiting Subject–Object Asymmetry in the Production of Cantonese Relative Clauses: Evidence From Elicited Production in 3-Year-Olds. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Durrleman, Stephanie & Anamaria Bentea
2021. Locality in the acquisition of object A’-dependencies: insights from French. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 39:1
Kim, Ji Hyun
2021. The relative effect of recasts on L2 Korean learners’ accuracy development of two different forms and its relationship with language analytic ability. Language Teaching Research 25:3 ► pp. 451 ff.
Lau, Elaine & Nozomi Tanaka
2021. The subject advantage in relative clauses: A review. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6:1
ORDEM, Eser
2021. THE ADULT SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ ACQUISITION AND PRODUCTION OF SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATIVE CLAUSES. Çukurova Üniversitesi Türkoloji Araştırmaları Dergisi 6:1 ► pp. 106 ff.
Wang, Haiyan & Haopeng Yu
2021. The Production of Relatives in Mandarin Children With Specific Language Impairment–From the Perspective of Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Macdonald, Ross, Silke Brandt, Anna Theakston, Elena Lieven & Ludovica Serratrice
2020. The Role of Animacy in Children's Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English: Evidence From Sentence–Picture Matching and Eye Movements. Cognitive Science 44:8
Kim, YouJin, YeonJoo Jung & Stephen Skalicky
2019. LINGUISTIC ALIGNMENT, LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS, AND THE PRODUCTION OF STRANDED PREPOSITIONS IN RELATIVE CLAUSES. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 41:5 ► pp. 937 ff.
Lopes Câmara, Aliana & Roberto Gomes Camacho
2019. La expresión del pronombre reasuntivo en la cláusula relativa en la lengua española. Hispanic Research Journal 20:3 ► pp. 197 ff.
2019. Mandarin–English speaking bilingual and Mandarin speaking monolingual children’s comprehension of relative clauses. Applied Psycholinguistics 40:4 ► pp. 933 ff.
Altan, Aslı & Erika Hoff
2018. Complex Structures in the Child-Directed Speech of Native and Nonnative Speakers. In Psycholinguistics and Cognition in Language Processing [Advances in Linguistics and Communication Studies, ], ► pp. 127 ff.
CHAN, ANGEL, WENCHUN YANG, FRANKLIN CHANG & EVAN KIDD
2018. Four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of relative clauses: a permutation analysis. Journal of Child Language 45:1 ► pp. 174 ff.
Lopes Câmara, Aliana
2018. El procesamiento de la oración relativa en español: interferencias del factor «distancia» en el uso del pronombre reasuntivo. Forma y Función 31:2 ► pp. 69 ff.
Rezaeian, Mehrdad, Firooz Sadighi, Mortaza Yamini & Mohammad Sadegh Bagheri
2018. The role of animacy and language proficiency in the comprehension of English restrictive relative clauses by Iranian EFL learners: an emergentist approach. Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education 3:1
CAMACHO, Roberto Gomes
2017. Alinhamento e estratégias de relativização. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada 33:1 ► pp. 243 ff.
KIRJAVAINEN, MINNA, EVAN KIDD & ELENA LIEVEN
2017. How do language-specific characteristics affect the acquisition of different relative clause types? Evidence from Finnish. Journal of Child Language 44:1 ► pp. 120 ff.
KIM, CHAE-EUN & WILLIAM O'GRADY
2016. Asymmetries in children's production of relative clauses: data from English and Korean. Journal of Child Language 43:5 ► pp. 1038 ff.
Lau, Elaine
2016. The role of resumptive pronouns in Cantonese relative clause acquisition. First Language 36:4 ► pp. 355 ff.
Lau, Elaine
2025. The acquisition of relative clauses and noun phrase accessibility: testing the NPAH in Cantonese. Language Learning and Development 21:2 ► pp. 214 ff.
Lee, Teresa
2016. Dominant language transfer in the comprehension of L2 learners and heritage speakers. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 26:2 ► pp. 190 ff.
CHEN, JIDONG & YASUHIRO SHIRAI
2015. The acquisition of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language 42:2 ► pp. 394 ff.
Clemens, Lauren Eby, Jessica Coon, Pedro Mateo Pedro, Adam Milton Morgan, Maria Polinsky, Gabrielle Tandet & Matthew Wagers
2015. Ergativity and the complexity of extraction: a view from Mayan. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 33:2 ► pp. 417 ff.
KIDD, EVAN, ANGEL CHAN & JOIE CHIU
2015. Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children's comprehension of relative clauses. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18:3 ► pp. 438 ff.
MacDonald, Maryellen C.
2015. The Emergence of Language Comprehension. In The Handbook of Language Emergence, ► pp. 81 ff.
O'GRADY, WILLIAM
2015. Frequency effects and processing. Journal of Child Language 42:2 ► pp. 294 ff.
O'Grady, William & Myong Hee Choi
2015. Second Language Acquisition. In The Handbook of Korean Linguistics, ► pp. 355 ff.
Scontras, Gregory, William Badecker, Lisa Shank, Eunice Lim & Evelina Fedorenko
2015. Syntactic Complexity Effects in Sentence Production. Cognitive Science 39:3 ► pp. 559 ff.
Clachar, Arlene
2014. Processing Subject Relative Clauses in English: Evidence from Child Speakers of English-Lexified Creoles. Applied Linguistics► pp. amu077 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.
