Children's comprehension of relative clauses.

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.