Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs ("The book that the boy is reading"). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of…

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…

Previous research has reported that bilingual children sometimes produce mixed noun phrases with "correct" gender agreement--as in "der dog" ("der" being a masculine determiner in German and the German word for "dog", "hund", being masculine as well). However, these could obviously be due to chance or to the indiscriminate use of a default…