engleski

Croatian morphological richness supporting language production: Relative clauses in preschool and early school age

Acquisition of relative clauses as one of the most complex syntactic structures is a milestone in child language development. For years they have represented the interest of researches. They have been the subject of many studies. So far the research of acquisition and processing of relative clauses has taken place within different theoretical approaches. All of them point out several factors that affect the ability to master these structures and focus on the differences in the difficulty of mastering different types of relative clauses. Within generative theories, the difference in the types of relative clauses is explained by the syntactic movement that can occur from the subject or object position, dividing the relative clauses into subject relatives and object relatives. The syntactic movement is one of the factors that influences the acquisition and processing of the relative clauses. Crosslinguistic research shows that subject relatives are easier to process and are acquired earlier than object relatives. In addition to the syntactic movement, different morphosyntactic elements influence the acquisition and processing of the relative clauses. One of them is gender, which has proved to be a significant factor, particularly in morphologically rich languages. Gender differences affect understanding of the relative clauses ; children understand sentences with different gender noun phrases significantly better than those of same gender noun phrases. The aim of this paper was to explore the influence of the syntactic movement and the noun phrases gender in the production of attributive relative sentences in Croatian. The assumption was that the results would be consistent with those who have been repeatedly demonstrated across other languages. The study included 301 children aged 2 ; 0 – 7 ; 5. The children were asked to produce 14 embedded relative clauses according to a model sentence. The data were collected as part of the prestandardisation of the Croatian version of the New Reynell Developmental Language Scales (Kuvač Kraljević et al ; publisher: Naklada Slap). Subject relatives were produced significantly better than object relatives. In addition, the sentences with different gender noun phrases were produced more successfully than those of same gender noun phrases. The results allow a better understanding of the syntactic and morphological features affecting the child's ability to produce these complex structures and provide guidelines for future research of attributive relative sentences in Croatian.

relative clauses, syntactic movement, morphological features

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