Quantitative Differences in the Processing of Relative Clauses between Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers

This paper reports our experimental finding on the language development and the processing of Korean relative clauses with 86 Korean monolingual and 189 Korean-Chinese bilingual subjects at all age groups. We have adopted a picture-cued comprehension paradigm, where a subject is asked to pick out one of the two pictures that correctly describes what (s)he just heard. The test conditions include subject vs. object relatives with lexical heads, subject vs. object relatives with the bound nominal head kes 'thing', etc. Our data contradict earlier studies, where subjects found subject relatives easier than object relatives; in our data, both monolingual and bilingual children find object relatives easier than subject relatives. We explain the results in terms of the word order strategy for sentence processing, according to which children assign the subject/actor role to the linearly first NP in a sentence. Our data also show that there is a quantitative difference between monolingual and bilingual language development; i.e, the word order effect disappears earlier for monolinguals than for bilinguals.