Cover not available
Part of
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World
Edited by Kate Bellamy, Michael W. Child, Paz González, Antje Muntendam and M. Carmen Parafita Couto
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 13] 2017
► pp. 283–309

Chapter 12
Bilingual production of relative clauses in languages with opposite head-complement directionality

| University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
| University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
| University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)

The so-called SR advantage, based on the observation that S(ubject) R(elatives) are easier to acquire, comprehend or process as compared to O(bject) R(elatives) in many Verb-Object languages, contrasts with the pattern attested in some languages with prenominal relative clauses and/or Object-Verb word order. This study analyses the elicited production of relative clauses by four groups of Spanish-Basque bilinguals in their two languages. Results reveal a generally (similar or) higher accuracy in SR than in OR production across groups, regardless of language specificities (VO vs. OV, prenominal vs. postnominal RCs) and participants’ language and/or age profiles. A more detailed analysis of the non-target productions revealed that adult and even six-year-old bilinguals make use of language specific cues to distinguish SRs and ORs in their two languages discarding any crosslinguistic influence in this particular contact situation.

Keywords: language acquisition, relative clause, bilingualism, Basque, Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Relative clauses in Spanish and Basque
    • 2.1Spanish relative clauses
    • 2.2Basque relative clauses
    • 2.3Ambiguous relative clauses in Spanish and Basque
    • 2.4Complexity of SRs and ORs
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 May 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.13.12eze
References
Arosio, F., Adani, F., & Guasti, M. T.
(2009) Grammatical features in the comprehension of Italian relative clauses by children. In J. M. Brucart, A. Gavarró, & J. Solà (Eds.), Merging features: Computation, interpretation, and acquisition (pp. 138–155). Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Artiagoitia, X.
(1992) Why Basque doesn’t relativize everything? International Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology, 27, 11–35.Google Scholar
Basque Government
(2008)  EAS Euskal Herriko Hizkuntza-adierazleen Sistema [System of linguistic indicators of Euskal Herria]. [URL]
Brucart, J. M.
(1994) El funcionamiento sintáctico de los relativos en español. In B. Garza, J. A. Pascual, & A. Alonso Gonzalez (Eds.), II Encuentro de lingüistas y filólogos de España y México: Salamanca 25–30 de noviembre de 1991 (pp. 443–469). Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.Google Scholar
(1999) La estructura del sintagma nominal: Las oraciones de relativo. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 395–522). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.Google Scholar
Carreiras, M., Duñabeitia, J. A., Vergara, M., de la Cruz-Pavía, I., & Laka, I.
(2010) Subject relative clauses are not universally easier to process: Evidence from Basque. Cognition, 115, 57–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De la Cruz-Pavía, I., Elordieta, G., Sebastián-Gallés, N., & Laka, I.
(2015) On the role of frequency-based cues in the segmentation strategies of adult OV/VO. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 18, 225–241. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Rijk, R. P. G.
(1972) Studies in Basque syntax: Relative clauses. Cambridge, MA: MIT.Google Scholar
Ezeizabarrena, M. J.
(2012a) Children do not substitute object relatives with subject relatives in every romance language: the case of Spanish. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, LVII(2), 161–181.Google Scholar
(2012b) The (in)consistent ergative marking in early Basque: L1 vs. child L2. Lingua, 122, 303–317. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernández Soriano, O.
(1999) El pronombre personal: formas y distribución. Pronombres átonos y tónicos. In V. Demonte & I. Bosque (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 1209–1274). Madrid: Espasa Calpe.Google Scholar
Flynn, S., Foley, C., & Vinnitskaya, I.
(2004) The Cumulative-Enhancement Model for language acquisition: Comparing adults’ and children’s patterns of development in first, second and third language acquisition of relative clauses. The International Journal of Multilingualism, 1(1), 3–16. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Friedmann, N.
(2010) The production of relative clauses by 5-year-olds across multiple languages. They prefer to be the children who do not produce object relatives. Paper presented at the COST-A33 final conference: Let the children speak: learning of critical language skills across 28 languages, London, 22–24 January.
Friedmann, N., Belletti, A., & Rizzi, L.
(2009) Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua, 119(1), 67–88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Friedmann, N., & Szterman, R.
(2006) Syntactic movement in orally-trained children with hearing impairment. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 11, 56–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E.
(1998) Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E., & Wu, H.-H. I.
(2013) Processing Chinese relative clauses in context. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(1–2), 125–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grillo, N.
(2009) Generalized minimality: Feature impoverishment and comprehension deficits in agrammatism. Lingua, 119, 1426–1443. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gutierrez-Mangado, M. J.
(2011) Children’s comprehension of relative clauses in an ergative language: The case of Basque. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 18(3), 176–201. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2013) Ergative case in the production and comprehension of relative clauses in Basque. Poster presented at the International Symposium of Psycholinguistics, Tenerife.Google Scholar
Gutierrez-Mangado, M. J., & Ezeizabarrena, M. J.
(2012) Asymmetry in child comprehension and production of Basque subject and object relative clauses. In A. Biller, E. Chung, & A. Kimball (Eds.), BUCLD 36 Online Proceedings Supplement, [URL].
Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E.
(2004) Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Psychological Science, 15(6), 409–414. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kanno, K.
(2007) Factors affecting the processing of Japanese relative clauses by L2 learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29, 197–218. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keenan, E.L., & Comrie, B.
(1997) Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8(1), 63–99.Google Scholar
Kidd, E., Chan, A., & Chiu, J.
(2015) Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous Cantonese-English bilingual children’s comprehension of relative clauses. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(03), 438–452. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labelle, M.
(1990) Predication, wh-movement, and the development of relative clauses. Language Acquisition, 1, 95–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laka, I., Erdocia, K., Duñabeitia, J. A., Molinaro, N., & Carreiras, M.
(2011) Complex syntactic processing in very proficient non-natives elicits N400. Paper presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting CNS, San Francisco.
Mak, W. M., Vonk, W., & Schriefers, H.
(2002) The influence of animacy on relative clause processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 50–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M.
(2007) The weaker language in early child bilingualism: Acquiring a first language as a second language? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 495–514. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Munarriz, A.
(2017) The influence of structural distance in cross-linguistic transfer: A case study on Spanish-Basque bilingual aphasia. In K. Bellamy, M. Child, P. González, A. G. Muntendam, & M.C. Parafita Couto (Eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world (pp. 233–258). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Munarriz, A., Ezeizabarrena, M. J., & Gutierrez-Mangado, M. J.
(2016) Differential and selective morpho-syntactic impairment in Spanish-Basque bilingual aphasia Bilingualism, Language and Cognition 19, 4, 810–833. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Novogrodsky, R., & Friedmann, N.
(2006) The production of relative clauses in syntactic SLI: A window to the nature of the impairment. Advances in Speech-Language Pathology, 8(4), 364–375. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Grady, W., Lee, M., & Choo, M.
(2003) A subject-object asymmetry in the acquisition of relative clauses in Korean as a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 433–448.Google Scholar
Ozeki, H., & Shirai, Y.
(2007) The consequence of variation in the acquisition of relative clauses: An analysis of longitudinal production data from five Japanese children. In Y. Matsumoto, D. Y. Oshima, O. R. Robinson, & P. Sells (Eds.), Diversity in languages: Perspectives and implications. Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, M. T.
(1995) Resumptives in acquisition. Language Acquisition, 4(1–2), 105–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sainzmaza-Lecanda, L. & Schwenter, S. A.
(2017) Null objects with and without bilingualism in the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world. In K. Bellamy, M. Child, P. González, A. G. Muntendam, & M.C. Parafita Couto (Eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Soziolinguistika Klusterra
(2014) Datu soziolinguistikoen bilduma (1986–2011): Oiartzun ‘Sociolinguistic Data Collection (1986–2011): Oiartzun. [URL]
Su, Y.C.
(2004) Relatives in Mandarin children. Paper presented at Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition in North America. University of Hawai’i Manoa.
Su, Y. C., Lee, S. E., & Chung, Y. M.
(2007) Asyntactic thematic role assignment by Mandarin aphasics: A test of the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis and the Double Dependency Hypothesis. Brain and Language, 101(1), 1–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Torrego, E.
(1984) On inversion in Spanish and some of its effects. Linguistic Inquiry, 15, 103–129.Google Scholar
Weber-Fox, C. M., & Neville, H. J.
(1996) Maturational constraints on functional specializations for language processing: ERP and behavioral evidence in bilingual speakers. Journal of cognitive Neuroscience, 8(3), 231–256. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yip, V., & Matthews, S.
(2007) Relative clauses in Cantonese-English bilingual children. Typological challenges and processing motivations. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29, 277–300. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Munarriz, Amaia
2017. Chapter 10. The influence of structural distance in cross-linguistic transfer. In Multidisciplinary Approaches to Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 13], ► pp. 235 ff. DOI logo
Muysken, Pieter
2017. Chapter 13. The global and the local. In Multidisciplinary Approaches to Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 13], ► pp. 313 ff. DOI logo
Ramos Feijoo, Jon & María del Pilar García Mayo
2023. The acquisition of relative clauses by Spanish-Basque learners of L3 English: does dominance play a role?. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 61:3 ► pp. 1051 ff. DOI logo
Stern, Michael C., Christen N. Madsen, LeeAnn M. Stover, Cass Lowry & Gita Martohardjono
2019. Language history attenuates syntactic prediction in L1 processing. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science 3:2 ► pp. 235 ff. DOI logo
Vergara-González, Daniel & Luis López
2017. Chapter 11. Obliteration after Vocabulary Insertion. In Multidisciplinary Approaches to Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 13], ► pp. 261 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2024. 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.