Relative clause (RC) production is an important language milestone for children. Incorporating a felicitous context when assessing RC production is of theoretical and clinical value. This study investigated how a felicitous context influenced elicited production of RCs from monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Mandarin-English speaking children between the ages of five to seven. Children were primed to produce RCs in a structural priming task and in a referential communication task. Results showed that priming in the referential communication task led to a higher probability of RC production among all children than in the structural priming task. Older children with a better ability in handling task complexity produced more RCs than younger children in the referential communication task. In the structural priming task, older and younger children showed the same priming effect but were more likely to use the same RC structure previously heard in the prime sentences compared to in the referential communication task. In both tasks, children preferred to use subject RCs, which follow the canonical word order of English. These findings lend support to the emergentist view of language acquisition, reiterating the inseparable relationship between language forms and communicative functions. Clinically, a referential communication task is more ecologically valid than a structural priming task, whereas the structural priming task is more suitable for eliciting infrequent RC structures. Bilingual Mandarin-English speaking children generally showed similar production patterns as the monolingual English-speaking children. Length of English exposure was a predicting factor of bilingual children's RC production in the referential communication task, but not in the structural priming task. Results corroborate emerging research findings suggesting that the production of RCs and other complex sentences is an area of strength in bilingual Mandarin-English-speaking children and could potentially be used to identify DLD in this population. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]