9421542 The investigator will conduct a comprehensive investigation of children's relative clauses, consisting of six cross-sectional studies over a three-year period. In the first five studies, they will apply two well-established procedures in a consistent way to investigate a wide variety of data domains that bear on the theory of relative clauses. Each of these studies will investigate children's knowledge of a different subset of properties involving relative clauses. A sixth study will investigate children's on-line processing of sentences containing relative clauses. The studies are expected to produce both within subject and within age group correlations across the phenomena under investigation. In addition, children's judgments of sentences will be compared with their productions. The findings will shed light on the acquisition of relative clauses, as well as the properties of relative clauses in the adult grammar. They will enable us to characterize aspects of children's grammars and will help to determine how and when children's grarnmars change to the adult grammar. Such issues extend beyond the particulars of relative clauses to the acquisition process in general.
