Assignment of grammatical functions in French relative clauses
(1998) Language Sciences — Vol. 20, n° 2, p. 163-188 (1998)
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- In this article we take a functionalist approach to psycholinguistic modelling; in particular we aim to show how linguistic theoretical findings may help to understand the processes involved in natural language comprehension. The present research reports three experiments on the comprehension of French subject relative clauses and two forms of object relative clauses. In French, object relative clauses can be constructed with either a canonical subject-verb order, as in English, or with an inverted verb-subject order. Three self-paced reading tasks used this last structure, along with canonical object relatives (Experiment 1) and with subject relatives (Experiment 1, 2, 3) in a center-embedding construction. Comprehension accuracy rates and reading times were recorded in order to test predictions drawn from the Competition Model of Bates and MacWhinney (1982, Language Acquisition: The State of Art, pp. 173–218, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 1987, Mechanisms of Language Acquisition, pp. 157–193, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ; 1989, The Cross-linguistic Study of Sentence Processing, pp. 3–73, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Experiment 1 was intended to test the hypothesis that competition between NPs, memory load and perspective maintenance were the main determinants of the difficulty of role assignment in reversible relative clauses. In Experiment 2 and 3, subject relatives and inverted object relatives were compared, with several cues varied to evaluate their effect on role assignment.
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Schelstraete, M.-A., & Degand, L. (1998). Assignment of grammatical functions in French relative clauses. Language Sciences, 20(2), 163-188. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(97)00031-4 (Original work published 1998)