Author Description

This dissertation, "The Acquisition of Relative Clauses by Cantonese Children: an Experimental Approach" by Elaine, Lau,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled "The Acquisition of Relative Clauses by Cantonese Children: an experimental approach" Submitted by Elaine Lau for the degree of Master of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in June 2006 Chinese, as an head-initial language with prenominal relative clauses, is of particular interest to theories of processing and acquisition. Contrary to the subject advantage found in other languages, several theories predict an advantage (for both acquisition and processing) for object-extracted relative clauses (RCs) over subject-extracted RCs in Chinese. On the other hand, some accounts maintain a universal subject advantage across languages. Two experiments were conducted to examine the production and comprehension of relative clauses by Cantonese monolingual children aged 4 to 6. In addition to adopting the prototypical test sentences as used in research on relative clauses, this study incorporates relative clauses in copular constructions, with the intention of lowering the processing demands as suggested by Diessel and Tomasello (2005). Results from both tasks showed the best performance with subject-relatives, followed by agent- and patient-relatives, forming a hierarchy with significant differences, while performance on indirect object-, oblique- and genitive-relatives varied markedly between tasks. This accords with the developmental predictions derived from Keenan and Comrie's (1977)