Abstract
Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this meta-analysis follows an established and rigorous scientific method to test the generalizability of the subject preference in RC acquisition by evaluating the collective evidence. While the results show a significant crosslinguistic subject preference, there is a large amount of heterogeneity in the data. The manifestation of this subject preference may not be uniform across languages, depending on typological properties such as language headedness, RC headedness, and main clause similarity. The true impact of these features, however, requires research on more typologically diverse languages.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 219-243 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | First Language |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 30 Jan 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2024 |
Bibliographical note
We thank Alina Matthews, Kent Meinert, Jacob Owens, Jacob Schmitt, and Daniel Swanson for their help with coding, Laurie Durand for her editorial support, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on the manuscript.Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The publication of this article is supported by the resources provided to the first author by the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.
Keywords
- Relative clause
- acquisition
- comprehension
- meta-analysis
- subject–object asymmetry