Word Order Effect in Children's Garden Path of Relative Clauses

This study examines whether Chinese-speaking children use the NVN word order strategy to comprehend OO relative clauses. The results of a truth value judgment test showed that children in the older group (mean age 5;11) interpreted the test sentences correctly 93% of the time, but children in the younger group (mean age 4;9) wrongly considered the subject NP of the relative clause as the object of the main verb 46% of the time. The difference between the two age groups was significant (t(29) = 2.685, p < 0.02). Since Chinese-speaking children by 3 to 4 years old can produce relative clauses accurately (Su 2004), the comprehension errors from the younger children here are taken to reflect the difficulty of reanalyzing the sentences when they are led into a garden path, similar to the patterns found from adults in on-line sentence processing experiments.