Investigating the development of relative clauses in Cantonese school-aged children using sentence recall

Abstract

The study investigated the acquisition of Cantonese-Chinese relative clauses (i.e. subject, agent, patient, indirect object, oblique and genitive relatives) in school-age children as an extension of a previous preschool study (Lau, 2006). The presence of a subject- or an object-gap advantage for the acquisition was also investigated. Thirty-two children from two age groups (i.e. 6;00 – 7;00 and 8;00 – 9;01) were recruited from three different settings. They were required to do a digit span task and a sentence recall task. Recall accuracy, measured in terms of the Levenshtein Distance score, was compared between the two age groups and their error patterns were also analyzed. The results showed a trend of development across the two age groups and across the six types of relative clauses. The elder group significantly outperformed the younger group in the agent, the indirect object and the genitive relatives. A subject- or object-gap advantage could not be universally applied to the three pairs of relative clauses compared in this study, but the subject-gap advantage was found in two out of three pairs of comparisons (i.e. agent versus patient relatives and the SS and SO types of oblique relatives). The distribution of error patterns echoed with the quantitative findings.