| Abstract: | This study investigated children's ability to read and understand sentences containing relative clauses (RCs). A small group of seven-year-old children were tested on their comprehension of four different types of sentences containing them. It was anticipated that sentences without relative pronouns would be more difficult to understand than those where they were present: for example, The horse the man is chasing is fat would be more difficult than The horse that the man is chasing is fat. This was indeed the case in sentences where the pronoun functioned as object in the RC. Where the pronoun functioned as subject, presence or absence of the pronoun (plus auxiliary verb) was not an important factor. It seemed that the children did not make consistent use of pronouns to aid their parsing of the sentence. It is suggested that a still incomplete understanding of function words may contribute to beginning readers' difficulties. Moreover, these results did not entirely bear out predictions made from spoken language data, which suggests that syntactic complexity in written language may need special consideration. |
