Relative clauses and intervention effects

Abstract The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the presence of pronoun elements as intervening subjects in the elicitation of object relative clauses (ORCs) by children and adults (as a control group). It has been argued that the presence of a full DP intervening subject in ORCs brings difficulties for young children and that a significant improvement is obtained when the intervening subject lacks a lexical restriction. In this study, the elicitation of subject RCs, ORCs displaying a full DP, ORCs displaying third person pronouns, and ORCs displaying second person pronouns is contrasted. It is hypothesized that the person feature plays a role in helping to distinguish the moved object from the intervening subject and subsequently producing ORCs with first or second pronouns should be facilitated. Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers participated in the study: 14 younger 4-year-old children; 14 older 6-year-old children; and 21 adults. Results show better performance for ORCs displaying second person pronouns, suggesting that the person feature matters. Alternative and non-adequate responses are evaluated. So far, adults appear, despite the presence of a lexical restriction, to mostly benefit from the presence of an indexical pronoun as intervener, and children demonstrate a developmental trend in the same direction; it seems that processing capacities as an explanatory hypothesis are at stake.