Abstract :
Researchers have engaged in a spirited debate regarding the acquisition of relative clauses for the past two decades (de Villiers, Tager Flusberg, Hakuta Cohen, 1979; Sheldon, 1974; Slobin, 1971; Tavakolian, 1981). Early studies on the comprehension of relative clauses, referred to as RCs, utilized interactive tasks involving toys, revealing that children performed randomly until the age of five. However, a subsequent study by Hamburger Crain (1982) on American children, which controlled for probable processing and pragmatics effects in experimental tasks, demonstrated that four-year-olds exhibited comprehension and production abilities above chance levels. Similarly, a later study by Crain et al. (1990) observed the production of such sentences by two- and three-year-old Italian children. The conflicting findings in studies on RC acquisition have prompted extensive research primarily focused on postnominal languages like English, German, and other European languages (Sheldon, 1974; Flynn Lust, 1980; Tavakolian, 1981; Goodluck Tavakolian, 1982; Hamburger Crain, 1982; Lebeaux, 1990; Labelle, 1990; 1996). Conversely, there is a scarcity of studies on the L1 acquisition of RCs in prenominal languages. It is crucial to consider typologically diverse languages (e.g., Arnon, 2010; Courtney, 2006; Ozeki Shirai, 2010) to ascertain both the universal and specific aspects of language acquisition.
