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The acquisition of relative clauses by Tamil children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2000

USHA LAKSHMANAN
USHA LAKSHMANAN
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
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Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a cross-sectional study that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses by 27 Tamil-speaking children, who ranged in age from 2;11 to 6;6. A picture-cued production task was used to elicit relative clauses from the child subjects. An analysis of the subjects' responses revealed that children below the age of 5;0 relativized significantly less often than the older children; furthermore, when they did produce relative clauses, they exhibited a strong preference for the tag relative and produced significantly fewer participial relatives than the older children. The findings also indicated that the younger children produced a significantly greater number of pragmatically inappropriate responses than the older children. It is argued that the observed age-related differences in Tamil children's relativizations very likely stem from performance factors and that the younger children are probably not inferior to the older children with respect to their grammatical and pragmatic competence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , October 2000 , pp. 587 - 617
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The research reported here was made possible through a Summer Research Fellowship from the Office of Research, Development and Administration in the Graduate School at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Earlier versions of this paper were presented by the author at the following conferences: 1993 Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the 1999 South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable. I thank the Tamil children for their participation in the study. I am grateful to Dr. L. Rajalakshmi for doing the illustrations for the picture-cued production task. Thanks also to Latha Shanker, Toyoko Schmidt and Steve Parmenter for their help with the statistical analyses and to Jim Gair, L. Kalavathi, and Geoff Nathan for their useful comments and discussion. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to Dr. Elena Lieven, Editor of the Journal of Child Language for their very insightful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.