de Villiers J G, Flusberg H B, Hakuta K, Cohen M
J Psycholinguist Res. 1979 Sep;8(5):499-518. doi: 10.1007/BF01067332.
A review of the literature on children's use of relative clause constructions reveals many contradictory findings. The suggestion is that some studies fail to take into account the two factors of embeddedness (role of complex noun phrase within the sentence) and focus (role of head noun in the relative clause). The experiment reported here attempted to reconcile the disparate findings and extend the range of constructions examined. 114 children between the ages of 3 and 7 served as subjects in a test of comprehension using an act-out procedure of 9 different relative clause sentences that exhaust the possible combinations of 3 roles of the complex noun phrase in the sentence and 3 roles that the head noun plays within the relative clause (in each case, subject, direct object, and indirect object). All constructions were understood better with increasing age of the children; sex and sentence set were nonsignificant variables. The results reveal a difficulty in ordering of the 9 types of construction that is in keeping with a prediction based on surface structure processing strategies.
一篇关于儿童使用关系从句结构的文献综述揭示了许多相互矛盾的研究结果。有人认为，一些研究没有考虑到两个因素，即嵌入性（复杂名词短语在句子中的作用）和焦点（关系从句中中心名词的作用）。本文所报告的实验试图调和这些不同的研究结果，并扩大所考察的结构范围。114名3至7岁的儿童作为受试者，采用表演程序对9个不同的关系从句句子进行理解测试，这些句子穷尽了句子中复杂名词短语的3种作用和关系从句中中心名词所起的3种作用（在每种情况下，主语、直接宾语和间接宾语）的可能组合。随着儿童年龄的增长，所有结构的理解都变得更好；性别和句子组是无显著影响的变量。结果显示，9种结构的排序存在困难，这与基于表层结构处理策略的预测相符。
