Comprehension of relative clauses by L2 learners of English: no asymmetry and puzzling prepositions

Abstract

The asymmetry in processing subject and object relative clauses in first language acquisition has been the focus of interest of many researchers and has often been interpreted in terms of structural distance and Relativized Minimality. This paper investigates whether this asymmetry also holds for second language acquisition. A listening comprehension test was administered to French-speaking learners of English to see first whether the subject-object asymmetry in relative clauses (RCs) evidenced in native language children is mirrored in the second language acquisition of English, and second whether oblique RCs with stranded prepositions are more difficult to understand than their pied-piped counterparts. Whereas the experiment has evidenced no difference in the comprehension of subject and object RCs, it has however revealed a better comprehension of oblique RCs with stranded prepositions. This is a rather unexpected result considering the absence of this structure in the learners’ L1.

Keywords

• relative clauses
• SLA
• subject-object asymmetry
• preposition stranding
• English