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A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Holger Diessel and
Michael Tomasello
Holger Diessel*
Affiliation:
University of Jena
Michael Tomasello*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
*
Diessel, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik, Ernst-Abbe-Platz 8, 07743 Jena, Germany [holger.diessel@uni-jena.de]
Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany [tomas@eva.mpg.de]
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Abstract

This study reconsiders the acquisition of relative clauses based on data from two sentence-repetition tasks. Using materials modeled on the relative constructions of spontaneous child speech, we asked four-year-old English- and German-speaking children to repeat six different types of relative clauses. Although English and German relative clauses are structurally very different, the results were similar across studies: intransitive subject relatives caused fewer errors than transitive subject relatives and direct object relatives, which in turn caused fewer errors than indirect object relatives and oblique relatives; finally, genitive relatives caused by far the most problems. Challenging previous analyses in which the acquisition of relative clauses has been explained by the varying distance between filler and gap, we propose a multifactorial analysis in which the acquisition process is determined primarily by the similarity between the various types of relative clauses and their relationship to simple sentences.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 81 , Issue 4 , December 2005, pp. 882 - 906
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the Linguistic Society of America

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