The Relative Clause Processing Strategies In The First And Second Languages

Relative clauses have been extensively studied in language acquisition due to their complex structure. Different structure has different loads on the computational resource, and many accounts have attributed the difficulty to the use of some processing strategies. In this paper, we investigated the relative clauses processing in native Chinese, second language of English and Japanese. 40 grade-three Chinese English majors and 22 grade-three Chinese Japanese majors from Foreign Language Institute of Fujian Normal University participated in the experiments. The results show that learners may adopt different strategies to process the languages with different typological features, and L2 learners adopt similar strategies in sentence processing with L1, but the strategies of L1 influence their L2 processing. We also found that canonical word order seems to be the most general factor among the different types of relative clauses.