ON PSYCHOLINGUISTIC AND ACQUISITION STUDIES OF RELATIVE CLAUSES:AN INTERDISCIPLINARY AND CROSS-LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

This review article primary aims at researchers in the second language acquisition field but draws on existing literature in broad areas of(applied)linguistics including formal syntax,psycholinguistics,and L1acquisition.This paper discusses the topic of relative clause(RC)structures,summarizing studies that explore the comparative difficulty of different types of RCs when considering the factors of extraction,modifying position,animacy,corpus frequency,etc.A list of major theories pertinent to behavioral patterns of RCs are reviewed,including the implicational generalization of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy and processing models such as the dependency locality theory/linear distance theory and structural distance theory.It is believed that studies in East Asian RCs,particularly in Chinese,with its rare combination of head-final directions and SVO word order,bear significance in disambiguating the validity of these different processing/acquisition theories,which were most often proposed based on English RC studies.With an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic perspective,I present a wide range of existing research using various tasks,measures,and reporting different results,with a focus on Chinese RC acquisition.While presenting the theoretical proposals and empirical research for and against them,I review those previous studies in terms of theoretical background,design,methodology,and implications.I suggest that the field can move forward when future studies use a variety of tasks and data types,especially by incorporating psycholinguistically-sound techniques in second language acquisition research,and one can expect studies in Chinese RCs to be particularly fruitful.

This review article primary aims at researchers in the second language acquisition field but draws on existing literature in broad areas of （applied） linguistics including formal syntax, psycholinguistics, and L1 acquisition. This paper discusses the topic of relative clause （RC） structures, summarizing studies that explore the comparative difficulty of different types of RCs when considering the factors of extraction, modifying position, animacy, corpus frequency, etc. A list of major theories pertinent to behavioral patterns of RCs are reviewed, including the implicational generalization of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy and processing models such as the dependency locality theory/linear distance theory and structural distance theory. It is believed that studies in East Asian RCs, particularly in Chinese, with its rare combination of head-final directions and SVO word order, bear significance in disambiguating the validity of these different processing/acquisition theories, which were most often proposed based on English RC studies. With an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic perspective, I present a wide range of existing research using various tasks, measures, and reporting different results, with a focus on Chinese RC acquisition.