Some notes on the Acquisition of Relative Clauses : New Data and Open Questions

This paper presents new experimental evidence on the relevance of feature mismatch between the head noun and the embedded noun in the comprehension of relative clauses. Exp. 1 shows that number mismatch determines an amelioration of both subjectand object-extracted relatives in English children. Exp. 2 shows that animacy mismatch per se does not play a role in German but 4-year-olds show a frequency effect, which disappears in older children and adults. The implications of these findings for recent approaches to the acquisition of relative clauses are discussed.