Cross-linguistic differences and similarities in the acquisition of relative clauses: Evidence from Greek and Italian

This study addresses the question of how the cross-linguistic differences between Greek and Italian impact the comprehension of relative clauses by typically developing children. Specifically, we tested the effect of overt morphological case marking on the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses by children in Greek and in Italian in a crosslinguistic perspective. We did this by carrying out two comprehension experiments. In the first, we compared the comprehension of relative clauses in Greek and Italian. To obtain comparable data, we neutralized case marking in Greek DPs, and we achieved the distinction between subject and object relatives through number agreement on the embedded verb in both languages. In the second experiment, performed only with Greek children, we employed overt case marking on DPs. The results indicate that in the absence of morphological cues the Greek children performed like the Italian ones; the effect of overt case marking contributed significantly to the increase of the Greek children's performance on object relatives. We propose an account in terms of intervention on the dependency between the relative head and its copy (as in Friedmann et al., 2009), and of intervention on the AGREE relation between the agreement node and the subject in the thematic position. This double violation is responsible for the different acquisition path of different types of object relative clauses. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.