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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 10:2 (2020) ► pp.216–248

The acquisition of relative clauses in Russian and Polish in monolingual and bilingual children

| University of Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam | University of Stellenbosch

In this paper, we present the results on (re)production of relative clauses in a sentence repetition task by Russian and Polish monolingual and bilingual children (3;6–6;6 years). Russian and Polish both involve overt case marking in the relative clause formation, but the case marking in Polish is more regular and transparent. Our results suggest that, when case marking is the only disambiguating cue, its transparency and regularity contributes to a significantly better performance. This explains why the Polish children, both monolingual and bilingual, were more successful in reproduction of subject and object relatives compared to their Russian peers.

Keywords: acquisition of relative clauses, transparency in case marking, Slavic languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research on child acquisition of relative clauses
  • 3.Goals of this study
  • 4.The structure of relative clauses in Russian and Polish
  • 5.Acquisition of relative clauses in Russian and Polish children
  • 6.The current study
  • 7.Method
    • 7.1Participants
    • 7.2Tasks
    • 7.3Procedure
    • 7.4Coding and scoring
  • 8.Results
    • 8.1Error analysis
      • Russian
      • Polish
  • 9.Discussion
  • 10.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17031.pee
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