A Study Of Tianjin Children’s Acquisition Of The Relative Clause

In Hisao&Gibson (2003)’s Processing relative clauses in Chinese, the authors adopt three theories to support the hypothesis that whether it is a simple sentence or a complex sentence, the object-gapped relative construction is easier to acquire than the subject-gapped relative construction. Based on this point, this thesis conducts a picture-based production task among202children aged from3;0to7;0who are divided into4groups according to their ages. From the statistics, I find that in Mandarin Chinese, whether it is a simple relative construction or a complex doubly-embedded relative construction, the object-gapped relative construction is easier to comprehend and produce than the subject-gapped relative construction and this result goes well with Hisao&Gibson’s result.