1
Bilingual Children’s Comprehension of Relative Clauses
in Cantonese and English
In a longitudinal study of bilingual children, Yip & Matthews (2007) found that
object relatives emerged earlier than or simultaneously with subject relatives in these
children’s Cantonese; while in their English, Cantonese-based prenominal relatives
emerged first, with object relatives followed by subject relatives. These findings posed a
challenge to the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1997),
which predicts a subject advantage in the acquisition of relative clauses. We revisited this
issue by testing successive bilingual children’s comprehension of subject versus object
relatives in Cantonese and English.
Twelve bilingual children aged 4;3-4;9 were tested with a sentence interpretation
pointing task. The subjects speak Cantonese as their first language and were exposed to
English as a second language at school. (1)- (4) show examples of the experimental
stimuli.
(1) Cantonese subject relative
[RC __ sek3 gan2
go2 zek3 gung1gai1] go2 zek3 lou5syu2 hai2 bin1dou6 aa3
[
that
kiss-PROG
CL
chicken ]
that CL
mouse
is
where
SFP
‘Where is the mouse [RC that __ is kissing the chicken]?’
(2) Cantonese object relative
[RC
[
go2 zek3 joeng4zai2 teoi1 gaan2 __ ] go2zek3 tou3zai2 hai2 bin1dou6 aa3
that CL
sheep
push-PROG]
that CL
rabbit
is
where
SFP
‘Where is the rabbit [RC that the sheep is pushing __ ]?’
(3) English subject relative
‘Where is the cat [RC that ___’s feeding the duck]?’
(4) English object relative
‘Where is the horse [RC that the pig’s hugging ___]?’
Results indicated a clear subject advantage in processing English relative clauses, but no
such advantage for Cantonese relative clauses. The monolingual Cantonese baseline data
even exhibited an object over subject advantage (Chan, Lieven & Tomasello, in prep).
The Cantonese comprehension data constitute an apparent challenge to the NPAH.
We discuss two lines of explanation. From a processing perspective, the isomorphism
between Cantonese object relatives and main clauses may facilitate their comprehension;
while typologically, Chinese-type relatives can be considered a subset of attributive
clauses, in which no filler-gap dependency need be assumed (Comrie, 1996, 1998, 2002).