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Relatives Children Say

Article  in  Journal of Psycholinguistic Research · October 1998

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Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 27, No. 5, 199ft

Relatives Children Say

Cecile McKee,1,4 Dana McDaniel,2 Jesse Snedeker3

Accepted April 1998

In an experiment designed to elicit restrictive relatives clauses, 28 children ranging in

age from 2:2 to 3:10 provided a corpus of communicatively appropriate relative clauses.
In evaluating this corpus, we found that most children produced mostly adult relative
clauses most of the time. Detailed study of these utterances uncovered a few error pat-
terns, which we analyzed in light of several considerations (e.g., the overall frequency
of an error type, its distribution across children and items, its relation to the construction
under study, and the similarity of the error to what children do elsewhere). Only one
error pattern, namely some children 's production of inappropriate relative pronouns, is
argued to reflect a systematic feature of language development. We conclude that chil-
dren 's ability to represent the syntactic structure of the embedded clause is on target
very early.

INTRODUCTION
A radio announcer speaking (on National Public Radio (NPR), June 30,
1994) about an upcoming trial uttered the following linguistic monstrosity:
This study, begun in
1989 and completed in 1995, was funded by various sources: McKee received support
from the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona in 1989-1990. McKee
and Snedeker received support from the Royalty Research Fund at the University of
Washington in 1994. McKee and McDaniel received support from the National Science
Foundation (SBR-9421542) beginning in 1995. We are also grateful to the many folk
who helped us with these experiments. First, the children who participated in our study
were wonderfully generous with their linguistic data. Second, our collecting and tran-
scribing of these utterances would have taken even longer had we not had the help of
the following people: Veronica Carpenter (U.S.M.), Jewel Cripe (U.W.), Kristine Gjer-
low-Johnson (U.S.M.), James Lyle (U.W.), Tom Maxfield (U.S.M.), Kelley McDaniel
(U.S.M.), Jerry Neufeld-Kaiser (U.W.), and Diane Patterson (U.A.)
1 University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721.
2 University of Southern Maine 04104.
3 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19104.
4 Address all correspondence to Cecile McKee, University of Arizona, Department of
Linguistics, P.O. Box 210028, Tucson, Arizona 85721.

573

0090-6905/98/0900-0573$ 15.00/0 © 1998 Plenum Publishing Corporation

574 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker

"There is also a stained glove prosecutors have not said where they found."
Since we assume that this adult speaker's faculties were intact, either the
tragedy of the case unbalanced her language processing or the relative clause
construction itself was partly to blame. We suspect the latter because it is
relatively easy to collect a number of mutilated relative clauses produced
by normally functioning adults. One cannot help but wonder if there is
anything peculiar about this construction. Is it generally difficult to learn or
to process?
Interestingly, linguists and psychologists have long been intrigued by
children's acquisition of relative clauses. And, as the anecdote above sug-
gests, the construction does seem to present difficulties. Much research on
its acquisition has emphasized ways in which children's linguistic devel-
opment misses the target. We do otherwise here, emphasizing instead evi-
dence of English learners' early mastery of this construction. But our paper
will also consider the implications of a few cases in which children's at-
tempts to produce relative clauses systematically resemble something other
than their target language. Before turning to details on the construction itself,
we note that our research adopts both the continuity hypothesis and the
theory of universal grammar. The latter, in particular Chomsky's (1981,
1986) principles and parameters approach, posits innate specifications for a
finite set of grammatical options for all languages. Continuity further posits
that children's grammars never violate these options—that is, all stages of
development instantiate potential adult grammars (Pinker, 1984)
We focus on the restrictive relative clause5 for several reasons. First,
the embedding of a sentence in a noun phrase (NP) is considered structurally
complex, and a central issue in the study of child language regards com-
plexity effects in development. Is initial syntactic competence limited to so-
called "flat" or simple structures? To what extent might developmental
steps reflect performance demands, with underlying competence unaffected
by such complexity? Second, different performance measures often support
varying conclusions regarding linguistic competence. Previous comprehen-
sion studies of relative clauses have, for the most part, noted children's
grammatical inability. The present study, which is of production, supports
an alternative view. Third, relative clauses exist in some form or another in

5 In addition to the relatives studied here, there are also appositive relatives like the
italicized phrase in (i) below and free relatives like the italicized phrase in (ii). See
Ouhalla (1994) for an accessible discussion of relative clause types and several syntactic
issues related to this construction, not least of which are the status of the relative
pronoun and the level of the relative's attachment to its host.
(i) Rattlesnakes, which are fortunately noisy, populate Arizona,
(ii) Rattlesnakes usually get what they want.
Relatives Children Say 575

most (if not all) languages. The attested variety of forms will be pertinent
to analyses we consider here because another question in the study of child
language regards the specific ways in which development matches and mis-
matches the target. Cross-linguistic variation in the relative clause construc-
tion makes it ideal for exploring the constraints on grammatical options
hypothesized by universal grammar. If the continuity hypothesis is correct,
any initial grammar would include relative clauses, although not necessarily
structured as in the target grammar. How then does the child attain the adult
grammar? Are there defaults of some type, and to what extent is the process
input-driven? The research we present here provides some preliminary char-
acterization of the ways in which English learners' relative clauses converge
on and diverge from their target.
Our position leads us to the working hypothesis that the child's initial
grammar includes the capacity to represent relative clauses. In other words,
our current position is that initial knowledge about phrase structure includes
at least XP —» X ZP, i.e., structural complexity of the sort exemplified by
relative clauses. (Note, however, that the evidence supporting this position
is also compatible with a weaker version of the hypothesis: Such structural
complexity could be the result of developmental changes that occur a short
time before children begin producing the relevant phrases. For now, we
maintain the stronger position.) Our hypothesis finds empirical support in
various studies of children's early language production, the present work
included. Research by Limber (1973) and by Hamburger (1980), for ex-
ample, attested to the presence of relative clauses and precursors to relative
clauses produced by English learners under age 3.6 However, comprehension
data reveal a somewhat different picture, with research generally uncovering
patterns of poor performance. Two aspects of research on this topic are
relevant to an evaluation of the general findings. First, most comprehension
studies have included subjects much older than those in most production
studies. Second, earlier comprehension studies emphasized experimental
methods while production studies emphasized observation of naturally oc-

6 Hamburger's (1980) "precursors" to relative clauses were sentences like This my made
it, which he interpreted to mean This is what I made (based both on the context and
on the fact that the child did not substitute my for / in other constructions). If his
interpretation was right, then the child produced relatives that differed from those in
adult English in three ways: (1) There was no overt specifier. (2) The possessive form
was used for the subject. (3) There was a resumptive pronoun. Each of these three
characteristics exists in some language (e.g., even English doesn't always require an
overt specifier; in Japanese, the subject of a relative clause can be genitive; and re-
sumptive pronouns occur in Hebrew). Cases like Hamburger's precursors are easily
overlooked in studies of spontaneous speech because they are difficult both to under-
stand and to recognize as relative clauses.
576 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker

curring utterances.7 The study presented here provides production data elic-
ited experimentally.
To clarify the nature of diverging results in past studies, we review the
four types of restrictive relatives that have most captured the attention of
developmental psycholinguists. We illustrate these in (1) with stimuli from
Tavakolian's (1977) research. The codes preceding each sentence refer to
the relative clause's attachment in the matrix clause and to the gap within
the relative itself. For example, the relative clause in (la) modifies the matrix
O(bject) and contains a S(ubject) gap. A primary motivation for the variety
of past proposals regarding both children's grammatical competence and
their processing strategies was differences in their apparent comprehension
of these four sentence types.
(1) a. OS: The horse hits the pig that stands on the sheep.
b. OO: The horse hits the sheep that the duck kisses.
c. SO: The lion that the horse kisses knocks down the duck.
d. SS: The sheep that knocks down the rabbit stands on the lion.
As an example of a competence account, consider Tavakolian's (1977)
conjoined clause hypothesis. To explain her subjects' difficulty with all ex-
cept the SS type, Tavakolian proposed that children analyze the relative as
being conjoined to the matrix clause rather than embedded in it. As an
example of a performance account, consider Limber's (1976) hypothesis
regarding the paucity of subject relatives (SS and SO) in his earlier research.
Finding the same asymmetry between subject and object relatives in both
children and adults, Limber argued against attributing the pattern to gram-
matical competence per se. Instead, he found support for a pragmatic ac-
count: Sentence subjects tended to include many personal pronouns (which
cannot be modified with restrictive relatives) and few inanimate NPs (which
can); sentence objects showed the opposite tendency.
These differing approaches suggest some important lessons. For one
thing, the production studies raise doubts for purely grammatical explana-
tions of performance differences among the constructions shown in (1).
Where one study uncovers competence and another incompetence, our per-
formance as psycholinguists should be examined before children's perform-

7 For details, we refer the reader to critical reviews of the original research in Goodluck
and Tavakolian (1982) and Hamburger and Grain (1982). Representative studies of
children's production of relative clauses include Leopold (1949), Menyuk (1969), Lim-
ber (1973, 1976), and Hamburger (1980). See also Ingram (1975) and Labelle (1990).
Representative studies of children's comprehension of relative clauses include Sheldon
(1974), Legum (1975), Tavakolian (1977), Goodluck (1978), Solan and Roeper (1978),
and Goodluck and Tavakolian (1982). Ferreiro, Othenin-Mirard, Chipman, and Sinclair
(1976) present both comprehension and production data.
Relatives Children Say 577

ance as language learners is questioned. For the present then, we take the
production data as the truer indicator of children's early syntactic compe-
tence.8 And we assume that the comprehension data indicate aspects of lan-
guage processing that may be influenced by factors besides syntactic
knowledge (in children as in adults). Our primary goal in this paper, then,
is to present a corpus of utterances with which children's relative clauses
can be compared to what the adult grammar generates, thus furthering an
evaluation of universal grammar's options. We turn now to the experiment
that produced our corpus of children's relatives.

EXPERIMENT

The present study is an English counterpart to Grain, McKee, and Em-

iliani's (1990) research on Italian learners' production of relative clauses.
Our items parallel those in the Italian study to the extent allowed by the
differences between the languages. Both studies adopted Hamburger and
Crain's (1982) methodological suggestions, the most important of which
regards the felicity conditions governing the use of restrictive relative
clauses. What Hamburger and Crain emphasized was that an appropriate use
of the restrictive relative presumes a set of referents from which a subset
can be distinguished. Prior to these observations, some studies had relied on
children's responses to situations in which a restrictive relative clause was
pragmatically odd. This point is central to the experiment described below.

Methods

Subjects
Our study's 28 subjects ranged in age from 2;2 to 3;10 (years; months),
with a mean age of 3;3. There were 12 boys and 16 girls. Our subjects were
primarily drawn from and tested in preschools in Portland, ME; Seattle, WA;
and Tucson, AZ.9 Individual subjects will be referred to with abbreviations
like U.S. postal codes (e.g., HI and AR); their ages will be provided with
every utterance reported. Another 26 children (aged 2;1 to 3;5; mean 2;9)
began but did not complete the experiment because they failed either our

8 Our point here is logical, not methodological. If one task uncovers knowledge and
another does not, we have evidence for the knowledge, regardless of why one task did
not find it.
9 The Seattle and Tucson subjects were coordinated by McKee, the Portland subjects by
McDaniel. Where relevant, other differences between these subject groups will be noted.
578 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker

pretest or our test-internal criterion (to be described below). One other child
(aged 2;4) stopped the experiment and could not be induced to continue.

Procedures
Subjects were invited to play a game with two experimenters who were
already familiar to them. Each participant in this game had a unique role:
One experimenter was the storyteller; this person used toys to stage events
in the scenarios she presented. Both the child and the second experimenter
observed these events. After each scenario was presented, the second ex-
perimenter covered her eyes so that she could no longer see the toys, which
were still engaged in the event. The storyteller then pointed to one of the
toys, which the second experimenter had to pick up. The child, who had
previously agreed to help by saying what the storyteller was pointing to,
then described the toy(s). When this was successfully accomplished, the
second experimenter would uncover her eyes and then pick up the toy(s)
described by the child. Completion of this task was joyously celebrated by
all participants.
Two pretest items were scenarios In which the target toy could be
identified with a single noun or an adjective-noun sequence. These items
served both to teach the children the game and to identify children who did
not understand its central premise, namely that their main interlocutor could
not see the toys being designated. Eight children (mean age 2;9) failed to
describe the correct toy for either pretest item and were not included in the
study.
Each scenario in the experimental items crucially included two, three,
or four identical toys. A subset of these participated in some activity while
the other(s) did not. This meant that, in order to describe target toys to a
sightless person, the child had to refer to the scenario. The most obvious
way to do this is by using a relative clause. This point is illustrated in (2)
(2) Props: Four (identical) elephants and one friendly gorilla.
Story: The gorilla pats two of the elephants.
Target utterance: Pick up the elephants (that) the gorilla is patting.
In each trial, the "blind" experimenter continued to ask for instructions
regarding what to pick up until the child uttered a description that would be
communicative to someone who could not see the toys. Being extremely
cooperative during this odd exercise, children responded with many and
various attempts to help (including very rarely a polite suggestion that the
experimenter uncover her eyes). The exchange between the child and the
experimenters thus varied, depending on how patient the child was and how
quickly she referred to the storyteller's event. In the example below, the
Relatives Children Say 579

subject UT attempts to describe an alligator wiggling back and forth. The

adult's utterances are in parentheses; the child's communicative description
is italicized. (Further examples are included in the appendix.)
UT 2;11: that one (Which one?) that alligator (Which alligator? There's two
of 'em. And which one is Jewel pointing to?) that one (What's the name of
it?) alligator (Oh, an alligator. And which alligator shall I pick up?) that one
(Can you tell me with some other words?) umm that's a alligator (OK, so 1
should pick up one of the alligators, right?) yeah (But there's two alligators.
So which one should I pick up? Which one is Jewel pointing to?) that one
(And which one is that one?) the one jumping on there
The exchange above includes utterances that failed to induce the ex-
perimenter to pick up a toy. Some children attempted several such descrip-
tions before succeeding communicatively. Versions of "that one" and "a
[N]" were the most frequent response that we judged to be noncommuni-
cative in this task's context. Other examples of noncommunicative responses
are given in (3).'°
(3) a. IA 3;2—hamburger—the one that he's touching
b. WY 2;5—elephant—/ don't remember
c. CA 2;2—elephant—it's a bigger that small one there
If a child persisted with such comments, she was encouraged to redescribe
the event using other words. On occasion, her interlocutor resorted to paus-
ing after a prompt like "the one...." If either experimenter judged the
child unable or unwilling to describe the toy, we moved on to the next item.
If a child gave only noncommunicative responses for three consecutive
items, we stopped the experiment to avoid frustrating children who were not
catching on to its routine. Eighteen children (mean age 2;9) were excluded
as subjects because of this test-internal criterion. It should be noted that this
criterion did not simply separate children who produced relative clauses
from those who could not. For example, one child who was excluded pre-
cisely because she failed this criterion nevertheless produced six relatives,
whereas our subject HI managed to describe the right toys on all 12 trials
without using a single relative clause.

10 Please note the following aspects of our examples of children's utterances: First, the
speaker, his/her age, and the target head of the relative clause precedes each utterance.
Second, in transcribing we did not spell words so that they correspond to our hypoth-
eses of a child's intentions. Sometimes this resulted in a nonaduit utterance, as in (3c).
In the cases where a word seems misspelled, it is consistent with the child's pronun-
ciation patterns, as in (4b). Third, speakers' pauses are indicated with three dots, as in
(6a). Finally, phonetic transcription was sometimes necessary, as in (7)
580 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker

Utterances that successfully communicated the right toy to the "blind"

experimenter were of several types, including the expected relatives. Any
pragmatically appropriate descriptions, as illustrated by the utterances in (4),
immediately resulted in the "blind" experimenter's picking up the right
toy(s). Thus, the utterance we selected for coding and analysis was usually
the final utterance in a trial.
(4) a. IL 3;2—dump trucks—this dump trucks that kitted
b. ID 3;3—hotdog—this one (this one) wifwifde pig
c. HI 3;4—chairs—the two flying ones
d. IN 3;2—sheep—(Which one is that one?) it's sleeping
With the exception of four Portland subjects, all experimental sessions
were audio-taped." An experimenter transcribed each subject's tape after
the session. All transcripts were rechecked by at least one other listener. In
cases of questionable sounds or transcriber disagreement, the relevant part
of the tape was reviewed again.12

Materials
Our 12 trials were designed to elicit several kinds of sentences, pri-
marily varying NP type and gap position. NP type refers here to whether
the NPs in a relative are plural or singular. We used eight singular and four
plural items, with transitive and intransitive verbs. Our manipulation of NP
types was motivated in part by Goodluck's (1978) comprehension study:
She used test sentences with reduced numbers of characters and found an
improvement in performance relative to that in other studies with stimuli
like in (1). Gap position indicates relative clause type. We targeted six OO
and six OS sentences, varying only the position of the gap within the rela-
tive.13 The head of each target relative was the object of a sentence like
"Pick up the [N] that...."
The props for this study were two sets of toys (East and West sets)
popular among children of our subjects' ages. Pilot testing determined which
toys were most easily recognized and named. As the toys were presented in

" Analysis of the responses of the four subjects whose sessions were not recorded was
based on notes written during the experiment. The recording of one Tucson subject
was marred by equipment problems. This affected the coding of one of RI's utterances.
12 In such cases with McKee's subjects, two new listeners did a third review. In such
cases with McDaniel's subjects, one of the two original transcribers did a third review.
13 The "size" of our experiment in terms of numbers and types of items was strongly
determined by our subjects' ages. For our purposes, it was more important to test
young children than to expand the set of construction types tested. Doing both was
not feasible.
Relatives Children Say 581

the course of the game, each child was asked to name them. When a child's
label surprised us, we probed to be sure it was stable and then adopted that
term. So, for example, we called many grapes "limes" and gnomes "Santa
Clauses" and sometimes Bert "Ernie."

Results
To anticipate our primary finding, most children produced mostly adult
relative clauses most of the time. Our data are 336 exchanges (from 12 trials
with 28 subjects), of which 317 or 94% included communicative responses.
Of those, 253 or 80% contained appropriate relative clauses. To appreciate
our upcoming analyses of exceptional utterances, it is first necessary to un-
derstand our classification procedures. The following subsection will clarify
our coding criteria, while the utterances with which we exemplify our de-
cisions will demonstrate the more pronounced difficulties inherent in coding
such data.

Our Coding and Its Consequences

The first distinction we made was between communicative and non-
communicative responses, with the latter discarded from further analysis
even though some included relative clauses. (See (3a) for an example.) Com-
municative responses distributed across the three general categories illus-
trated by the utterances in (5): relative clauses (RCs), ambiguous (A), and
other (O)
(5) a. HI 3;4—potato—the rolling one
b. VA 3;1—dump trucks—those trucks were crashing
c. ID 3;3—grapes—the ones wifde two horses
d. IN 3;2—crocodile—that crocodile [s] wiggling
e. TN 2;2—mitten—this mitten that Mickey Mouse is hiding in
f. ME 2; 11—lion—the one jumping on the table
g. CO 3;9—pizza—it's da one dose two guys are dancing on
The O category is a catch-all for communicative responses clearly lacking
anything like a relative clause; relevant examples are (5a) to (5c). The A
category includes utterances that were codable as either O or RC; a relevant
example is (5d). This utterance could include a reduced version of the rel-
ative "that is wiggling," or, it could be the simple sentence "that crocodile
is wiggling." The RC category includes utterances like those in (5e) to (5g).
The analysis of any particular utterance, and especially its classification into
the A or RC categories, requires further comment. We turn to these issues
momentarily. But first, our coding breaks down our 317 communicative
582 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedekcr

responses into the three general categories just described: 253 RC, 17 A, 47
O. Thus, 80% of the communicative responses were RCs.
Because young children often mispronounce words and reduce or omit
elements, determining the status of an utterance was not always trivial. When
confronted with coding quandaries, we first identified adjustments that would
have to be assumed for the most reasonable interpretations, i.e., a simple
sentence or an NP containing a relative. We then selected the analysis re-
quiring the fewest such adjustments. To illustrate, we discuss the utterances
in (6). An RC analysis of (6a) requires no adjustment because adults might
reduce "this one that is crashing" to precisely this utterance. But an O
analysis requires one adjustment: If the child was attempting to produce
"this one is crashing," the utterance is missing its auxiliary verb.14 As other
examples of our reasoning, compare (6b) and (6c). The utterance in (6b)
could be a syntactically sound RC missing some material (perhaps the rel-
ative pronoun and the auxiliary verb), or it could be a syntactically sound
declarative sentence (a possible but pragmatically odd response to the ques-
tion "Which one should I pick up?"). Since neither analysis requires more
adjustments than the other, we had a tie and gave (6b) an A code. A case
in which such tallying resulted in an O code is (6c). Classifying it as an RC
requires either assuming that the relative pronoun was incorrectly omitted
or that the auxiliary was incorrectly produced, while no adjustments are
needed to analyze it as a simple sentence.
(6) a. ID 3;3—dump trucks—this one.. .crashing
b. MA 2;11—chair—that one. . .failed over
c. MS 3;0—elephant—tha one is bouncing on the block
We identified each RC as having one of three general forms that occur
in adult English. At this stage of analysis, we first checked for the presence
of a relative pronoun. In the target language, a full form contains both a
relative pronoun and an auxiliary verb, as in (5e). Of the 253 RCs in our
corpus, 184 or 73% met this criterion for full forms. Classifying these was
relatively easy because the mere presence of that usually disambiguates such
utterances. In the few unclear cases, we looked for a minimum of two phones
compatible with the target pronoun and auxiliary. The utterances in (7), for
example, were coded as full RCs on this basis.
(7) a. IN 3;2—elephant—the other one [ts] jumping up.. .up and
down

14 Since the target utterance refers to two trucks, (6a) includes an error involving what
McKee and Emiliani (1992) called "contextual agreement" (to be discussed below).
This fault does not distinguish between the RC and O analyses because it would be
an error in both cases.
Relatives Children Say 583

b. MS 3;0—airplane—one [cez] backwards right here

c. WY 2;5—elephants—[J3 w dnzeyr.. .fas g swlw 3] hugs}i
Another adult form is the so-called reduced relative. These are subject rel-
atives with a subject gap; in addition, the relative pronoun and the auxiliary
verb are elided, as in (5f). Of the 253 RCs in our corpus, 38 or 15% were
coded as reduced relatives. The remaining 30 RCs or 12% were coded as
zero-complementizers. In the target language, these are object relatives. In
addition to the object gap, these RCs lack an overt relative pronoun, as in
(5g). Further examples of full, reduced, and zero-complementizer RCs are
given in (8), (9), and (10)
(8) full RCs
a. CT 2; 10—lion—that one that's jumping on the table
b. FL 2; 11—mitten—pick up this one. . .that Minnie Mouse is
hiding in
c. IN 3;2—dump trucks—these trucks that crashed
d. MD 3;7—hamburger—the one that's being jumped on
e. LA 3;8—car—the car that's pushing the horse
(9) reduced RCs:
a. TN 2;2—hotdogs—those hopping on the tomato
b. MA 2;11—bicycle—that bicycle running back and forth
c. ID 3;3—alligator—this one wiggling
d. AZ 3;8—elephant—this one jumping
e. AK 3; 10—potato—this one rolling
(10) zero-complementizer RCs:
a. UT 2; 11—grapes—the ones they 're eating
b. MS 3;0—pizza—that one uh Bert was hitting
c. VA 3;1—elephants—those ones the gorilla's patting
d. WA 3;9—plates—the ones the elephants are licking
e. NB 3; 10—pizza—the the toy he's hitting on

Exceptional Utterances
We now consider RCs that, in some respect or another, differed from
the experiment's targets. Because our return to issues we raised at the be-

15 This example also illustrates a point regarding individual speakers' patterns that is
often less obvious to experimentalists than to students of spontaneous production data:
Pronunciation idiosyncrasies can be exploited in the interpretation of children's utter-
ances. WY, for example, regularly substituted glottal stops [?] for the interdental
fricatives [6, 0]. We think, by the way, that his utterance in (7c) corresponds to some-
thing like "the ones there. . .that gorilla hugs."
584 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker

ginning of this paper will emphasize these considerations, we would stress

before turning to the exceptional utterances that two-thirds of the RCs in
our corpus were both syntactically and pragmatically appropriate. Moreover,
most of the exceptional utterances did not necessarily reflect properties of
the children's grammars. To illustrate this point, we will begin with an error
that adults also produce (see McKee & Emiliani 1992). We will then de-
scribe several other errors, ending with ones that most clearly suggest syn-
tactic development. Relevant to the question of the source for each error
type are the patterns specific to items and subjects. (Note that an utterance
can show more than one error type.)
/. Head Errors. Twenty-six RCs (from 17 children) had problems in-
volving the head alone. These included both RCs whose heads did not ex-
actly match the item's context in some way or another and RCs whose heads
were missing.
• Ten utterances (from nine children) illustrate "contextual agree-
ment" errors, i.e., they are morphosyntactically sound RCs whose
heads show the wrong number. One example was given in (6a), and
another can be seen in (lla). Interestingly, all of these are cases
where a singular head was produced in items targeting plural heads.
Moreover, half of these utterances were in response to the first item
designed to elicit a plural head. Note that adults sometimes make
such errors.
• Nine RCs (from seven children) modify the wrong head. This is a
reference rather than a number problem, and these cases might reflect
children's confusion about an event. In four cases, we have no evi-
dence bearing on this possibility. But in the remaining five cases,
the experimenters' questions revealed that the child was not confused
about what was being designated. The example in (11b) is like this
because, earlier in the item, CA correctly identified a hotdog as the
toy to be picked up. Partly because several of these responses are
ambiguous with respect to the question of the child's intention, their
distribution by child and by item is not informative. Even so, note
that DK contributed three utterances of this type. Also, it is inter-
esting to observe that all nine of these errors came from OO items,
and effectively resulted in OS relatives.
• Seven RCs (from six children) are missing heads. In four cases, the
RC immediately followed an adult utterance providing a plausible
head, as in (1 Ic). But in three cases, the child's RC must be consid-
ered incomplete unless one searches farther upstream than the im-
mediately preceding utterance.
Relatives Children Say 585

(11) a. UT 2;11—dump trucks—the one knocked down

b. CA 2;2—pig—that one eating that hotdog
c. LA 3;8—elephants—(the ones. . .) that the monkey's petting
II. Number Errors. The six RCs in this category (from five children)
show intrasentential agreement problems. In two of these, the locus of the
error appears to involve the RC's head, i.e., in (12a) and (12b). The others
resemble (12c) in containing is where are should have occurred.16
(12) a. LA 3;8—airplane—the ones that's laying back down
b. IL 3;2—dump trucks—this dump trucks that kitted
c. MA 2; 11—hotdogs—the hotdogs what's jumping on the po-
mato
HI. Auxiliary Errors. The 22 RCs in this category (from 14 children)
include a variety of problems, all featuring inappropriate omission, addition,
or ordering of some form of to be. (Note that these utterances do not include
overt agreement errors.) Ten of these were missing the target is or are, as
in (13a) and (13b). Four (from WA and LA) contained an extra is or [s], as
in (13c). In seven RCs like (13d) and (13e), the auxiliary and the subject
were inverted. Another error we have included in this category although it
involves more than the auxiliary was (13f), where the subject follows the
verb phrase. Most of the 22 RCs in this category involved the production
of a singular verb.
(13) a. MD 3;7, MT 3;7—chairs—the ones that flying
b. IL 3;2—car—the racing car tha pushing the horse
c. LA 3;8—pizza—dat.. .the one that's Bert's hitting
d. TX 3;2—hotdog—tha's the samwich which is the pig eating
e. AR 3;7—pizza—the one that's Ernie jumping on"
f. DK 3;9—strawberries—(What "both of them"?) the ones who
are eating the horses

16 One of the utterances in this category shows another error, but that error does not fit
into any of our other categories. The utterance is given in (i) below. Consideration of
the adult English equivalent given in (ii) suggests that AL omitted the possessive
marker. This study was not designed to elicit the possessive construction, and this was
our only exemplar of it (grammatical or ungrammatical); we make no conclusions about
English learners based on this one example. But Labelle (1990) reported this type of
error in young French learners. And in other research on English [McDaniel, McKee,
& Bernstein (1998)], we have studied such genitives in considerable detail,
(i) AL 3;8—bicycle—the one 'at the wheels is going
'ii) the one whose wheels are going
17 AP also produced this same utterance without contraction.
 586 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker

Tabel I. Summary of Errors, by Types and by Subjects

Error type Number of errors" Number of subjects*
Head 26 17
Contextual agreement 10 9
Wrong head 9 7
Missing head 7 6
Number 6 5
Auxiliary 22 14
Omission 10 8
Addition 4 2
Inversion 8 5
Pronominal 31 6
Resumptive 7 3
Relative pronoun 24 4
a While the total number of errors is 85, the total number of utterances showing these errors is only
74. There were 1 1 cases where the RC contained two error types.
* The total number of subjects producing these errors is 23. Most of these 23 subjects contributed
several types of errors to these tallies.

IV. Pronominal Errors. This category, which reveals the most interest-
ing within-subject patterns, includes two types of errors involving pronom-
inal elements in the relative construction.
* Seven resumptive pronouns (from three children) occurred in our
corpus of RCs, three of which are given in (14). Although adults do
produce this error, the limited distribution of these in our corpus
might suggest a grammatical account: CT produced four resumptive
pronouns, TX two, and AK one. However, all of these errors oc-
curred in the second half of the experiment and five of the relevant
utterances also show some other error. We will discuss this error
type below.
• Twenty-four RCs (from four children) include non-English relative
pronouns. In 19 cases, it was what. In four cases (all from CT), it
was why. In one case, it was who. Examples are given in (15). In-
terestingly, only NB, DK, CT, and MA accounted for all of these
errors. And in each such case, this error characterized at least half
of his/her full RCs.
(14) a. CT 2; 10—strawberries—pick those two up what the dinosaur
is eating them
b. TX 3;2—pizza—that one which is Bert patting it
c. AK 3; 10—hotdogs—pick these ones up that they're bouncing
on the potato
Relatives Children Say 587

(15) a. NB 3;10—pizza—the one what they're dancing on

b. DK 3;9—potato—the potato what she's rolling
c. CT 2; 10—bicycle—pick this one up why Dorothy's riding
d. CT 2; 10—plates—those plates why the elephants are eating
them
e. DK 3;9—chairs—the chairs who are flying
To summarize these results, Table I shows the types of errors described
above, the number of occurrences of each type, and the number of subjects
contributing those utterances. It is clear from Table I that most of the errors
were either infrequent, or they came from a relatively large number of dif-
ferent subjects. The exception to that pattern is the category of pronominal
errors, which is also the only type that is directly and unambiguously related
to the relative clause construction. The relative pronoun error, which was
produced by only four subjects, is particularly striking. This error type seems
the most likely candidate for a pattern that reflects development in linguistic
competence per se. In the Discussion section, we will address the relative
pronoun errors in more depth.

Individual Children
We turn now to analyses of individual subjects. Figure 1 gives each
child's performance across all items. Subjects are ordered by age, with the
youngest at the left. As pointed out earlier, some utterances are clearly RCs
while others are less clear. We put ambiguous utterances at the top of each
child's column. As uncovered by our report on exceptional utterances, only
a few subjects showed strong tendencies toward particular patterns. These
were the three children who produced resumptive pronouns (CT, TX, AK)
and the four children who contributed the non-English relative pronouns
(NB, DK, CT, MA)

DISCUSSION

As usual, there are two major directions one can take in interpreting
child language data. Some so-called errors might be regarded as "mere
performance" while others might be taken to reflect "serious grammatical
change." While it seems reasonable (at least, initially) to label the less
systematic patterns as performance errors, we do not dismiss the investiga-
tion of such patterns as a fruitless endeavor. As Fodor and Garrett (1966, p.
138) put it, "in the sense in which distinguishing between performance and
competence is distinguishing between behavior and the mechanisms under-
lying it, both linguistic and psychological models are models of compe-
588 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker
Relatives Children Say 589

tence." Indeed, we are convinced that—even with developing systems—one

can find systematicity in performance errors if enough are examined. But
the corpus we present here does not contain the amount or the kind of data
necessary to support such observations. So we use the present data to address
questions of grammatical competence alone. And we take a cautious ap-
proach to the business of documenting grammatical development.
Let us consider these issues now, beginning by noting that a number
of factors bear on which errors qualify for our attention if our goal is to
document grammatical development. These include, but are not limited to,
the following: the overall frequency of an error type, its distribution across
children and items, its relation to the construction under study, the similarity
of the error to what children do elsewhere, and what other populations do.
To illustrate our use of such factors, many of our head errors resemble
utterances that adults also say. Of course, when such competent speakers
produce such an error, we attribute its occurrence to something other than
a changing grammatical system. But other possibilities are traditionally con-
sidered when such errors, even if they exactly duplicate adult errors, are
produced by children. We argue here that systematicity is crucial to the claim
that the child's error differs qualitatively from the adult's. The number errors
invite a similar treatment. They were infrequent; they were produced by
different children; and they resemble adult speech errors (Bock, 1991, 1993).
It is also worth emphasizing that these errors are not necessarily related to
relative clauses; that is, even if they reflect nonadult aspects of the children's
grammars, they also occur in constructions that do not involve relative
clauses (or, for that matter, any type of movement). With respect to the
auxiliary errors, it is our impression that these occur more often in child
than in adult speakers. They are a widely reported phenomenon in young
children's speech. But since no auxiliary error was consistently made by
any particular child in our study, we assume that these too do not reflect
properties of children's mastery of the grammatical underpinnings of relative
clauses.
We turn now to the pronominal errors, which did reveal distinct patterns
in individual children. We focus first on the resumptive pronouns in our
corpus. There are many adult grammars where resumptive pronouns appear
in relative clauses, either optionally or obligatorily (Sells, 1984). In most
dialects of English, they are ungrammatical; yet, they are occasionally used
by speakers who get trapped in very long and/or very complex relatives.
(See Foss & Fay, 1975, for a discussion of speech errors like And when they
chew coca, which they chew coca all day long.) We suggest that the re-
sumptive pronouns in our data reflect performance demands (as in adult
English) rather than a grammar that systematically generates resumptive pro-
nouns, as has been argued by Labelle (1990). One reason for our position
590 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker

is that each child who produced resumptive pronouns produced more RCs
without them than with them. Second, most of these resumptive pronouns
are in object position. This too corresponds to adult English usage: English
speakers rarely use a resumptive pronoun in the subject position of the high-
est clause, i.e, right next to the head (e.g. that's the girl who she's nice).
Each of our two subject cases (from two different children) contained a split
verb-particle construction; these are given below.
(16) a. AK 3; 10—hotdogs—pick these ones up that they're bouncing
on the potato
b. CT 2; 10—hotdogs—pick those up what they're jumping on the
big tomato
In both cases, the head is separated from the relative clause by the particle
up, indicating that the relative is extraposed. Such extraposition creates a
structure where the gap associated with the head is distant from the head.
Not only does the word up intervene then, but the relative clause is also
distanced hierarchically from its head through the adjunction structure.
These cases, therefore, correspond to the very types of complexities that
characterize adults' use of resumptives. But it might be that these clauses
are like afterthoughts rather than extraposed relatives. In these cases too, the
use of resumptive pronouns is natural since there is no structural link be-
tween the relative and its head. In sum, the few resumptive pronouns in our
data do not provide conclusive evidence that children's grammars generally
permit resumptive pronouns. The lack of systematicity in this error's occur-
rence reminds one more of so-called performance phenomena. However,
further research on this question is clearly in order (see Bernstein, McDaniel,
& McKee, 1998; Guasti & Shlonsky, 1995).
Turning finally to the non-English relative pronouns, we argue that a
competence account is plausible. But first, we note that each subject who
produced these also used adult English forms. For the three children who
produced most of the non-English relative pronouns, these forms were that
(from CT), who with animate heads (from DK), and zero-complementizers
(from NB). We stress two important points here: First, these errors are char-
acteristic of only a few children; that is, we do not find many contributors
to the pool of odd relative pronouns. Related to this is the fact that the
distribution of relative pronoun types does not seem to depend on subject
versus object relatives for these children. Second, one can find consistency
across the utterances of the children who did produce odd relative pronouns.
A pattern emerges in DK, CT, and MA's utterances with respect to animacy:
What and why were used only with inanimate heads; that and who were
used more with animate heads. NB demonstrated less specificity because
she used what with both animate and inanimate heads. Such systematicity
Relatives Children Say 591

favors a competence account here. (Of course, it remains to be seen whether

this knowledge is best characterized as lexical or as syntactic—a distinction
that is not always obvious.) Before going on to discuss larger issues brought
up by this conclusion, we will point out the interesting utterance in (17).
This utterance includes NB's only instance of that; in it we see her "self-
correct" to what, and then resort to a zero-complementizer.
(17) NB 3; 10—hotdog—the the the one that—what the pig is—the the
one the pig is eating
Assuming that these subjects' non-English relative pronouns do reflect
competence, then several questions arise about their grammars. First, what
is the status of the relative pronouns what and why? Are they complemen-
tizers or Wi-phrases in SpecCP? Radford (1988) argued that what is a com-
plementizer in adult dialects that allow it. His argument was based on the
fact that what cannot be used in a pied-piped construction, as in (18a). In
this respect, it resembles the complementizer that in (18b). Compare these
examples with the wh-phrase which in (18c). Unfortunately, we do not have
these subjects' judgments of such comparisons.
(18) a. *That's the table on what I put the book.
b. *That's the table on that I put the book.
c. That's the table on which I put the book.
Further questions involve learnability issues: How did these children
arrive at their relative pronouns in the first place? And how will they dis-
cover that their relative pronouns are not possible? Here, the similarity be-
tween RCs and wh-questions is important. It might be that what is a default
guess that children use before they figure out all the differences between
these constructions in their target language. In this case, such relative pro-
nouns might be "flagged" in the sense of Pinker (1984). That is, they would
be marked in the lexicon as unsure forms to be used until the adult form is
registered. If the adult form corresponds to the flagged form, the flag is
removed; if the adult form differs, then it replaces the flagged form. Subjects
who make an animacy distinction would simply need to register an adult
relative pronoun referring to an inanimate head in order to learn that their
inanimate forms are incorrect. The child who did not make the animacy
distinction (NB) might have been at a less mature point than the other three
children, a stage in which what is a flagged form for both animates and
inanimates. This child would then remove the incorrect form upon noticing
that's function as a relative pronoun.
Resolution of these kinds of questions will bear on the adequacy of
universal grammar's explanation of language acquisition. The data presented
here hint at directions that such resolutions might take. For example, more
592 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker

detailed study of children like NB, DK, CT, and MA will reveal constraints
on possible forms for relative pronouns. Systematic attention to cross-lin-
guistic comparisons, both of an empirical nature and of a theoretical nature,
is also clearly warranted. A greater variety of RC structures than has thus
far been studied with children must be examined now, but crucially with
reference to the forms attested across languages. It also seems to us that
new data sources are needed in order to see why comprehension and pro-
duction studies suggest such different conclusions. Data like act-out re-
sponses as well as experimentally elicited utterances should be supplemented
by on-line measures of sentence interpretation and by acceptability judg-
ments. For example, reaction time data will illuminate some hypotheses
regarding the conjunction versus adjunction distinction. Systematic study of
children's judgments of relative pronouns in a variety of possible and im-
possible structural slots also remains to be attempted. So, the "future re-
search" list is lengthy in this case.
In connection with that, we note our joy in finding how much remains
for acquisitionists to do in the study of children's mastery of this one con-
struction. Children, on the other hand, seem to have relatively little to do
when mastering this construction. We close this paper then by reminding
the reader how very fine our subjects' RCs were, even those produced by
the youngest children. This research lowers the age when we see syntactic
sophistication. And this comports with the predictions of the theory of uni-
versal grammar. The only wrong turns we see are in language-specific and
lexical aspects of the RC construction—the form of the relative pronoun.
We see no evidence of structural miscalculations as children learn that a RC
can be embedded in a NP. Instead, as soon as children string words together,
they seem to do so with the powerful and rule-governed system that de-
scribes the target system.

APPENDIX

The following complete exchanges between child subjects and experi-

menters illustrate the variety of ways in which an experimental item could
proceed after the toy(s) to be described had been pointed to. The "blind"
adult's utterances are in parentheses. The storyteller's utterances are in curly
brackets. In each exchange, the coded utterance is italicized. Our code, in
bold typeface, follows that. An item's target utterance is given in caps,
merely to clarify the scenario the child is responding to. Please recall that
there is always the possibility of a communicative response other than our
specific target.
Relatives Children Say 593

THE HOTDOG THAT THE PIG IS EATING

ID 3;3: this one this one (What toy am I supposed to pick up?) this one to
pick up (What's the toy?) a hotdog (But there's two hotdogs... Which one
should I pick up? this one (Which one is "this one"?) this one (Can you tell
me with other words cause I don't understand "this one"?) this one (Yeah,
but I don't understand "this one".) I don't know (How is it special? I hear
some eating noises.) a pig (There's a pig in this story? So which hotdog should
I pick up?) this one (Can you tell me with other words?) this one (I can't see
"this one") this one (Tell me with other words.) this one (this one)  wif  wif
de pig. Other
AZ 3;8: a hamburger (And which hamburger? Cause there's two of 'em?
Which one shall I pick up?) this one (Which one is "this one"?) {Can you
tell her with words?} this hamburger (Uhm, which hamburger?) this one the
pig is eating, zero-complementizer RC

THE LEMON THAT THE SMURF IS JUMPING ON

ID 3;3: um pick up, a smurf es jumping on this wemon wif de leaf (Yeah,
but what toy am I supposed to pick up?) this one (What's the name of it?)
um a smurf (What toy is Dana pointing to ?) a wemon (I wonder if I should
pick up a lemon.) yeah (Oh, but there's two lemons. Well, I dunno which one
to pick up.) es.. .m.. .wite here (But I can't see "right here." So which one?)
this one (I don't know which one is "this one" because I can't see anything.
You could tell me about the story maybe.) this one (Which one is "this one"?)
the smurf is jumping on it. Other
IL 3;2: that lemon (Which lemon?) this lemon (There's two lemons. So which
one should I pick up?) this one, this one, this lemon (I can't see "this one.")
that lemon, this lemon (Hmm, I can't see "this lemon," so can you tell me
some more maybe?) the lemon needs [9] be a part of that lemon, so you need
[ds] pick one (But I'm only supposed to pick one lemon, right?) that lemon
(Is there an elf doing something? Hmm, hmm...) {stomp stomp stomp stomp}
(So which lemon should I pick up?) {stomp stomp stomp} this one.. .that one
right there (I can't—) {Can you tell her something about the story?} you need
to pick it up ??? and he'll put it away ??? (Let's do another story!), noncom-
ntunicative
IA 3;2: that one (Mmm, which one? My eyes are covered so I don't know.)
that one (What's the name of it?) a lemon (Oh, so I'm supposed to pick up
one of the lemons.) this one that he's touching (Uhm, that who's touching?
Remember my eyes are covered so.. .so—so which one am I supposed to pick
up?) this one that he's ??? (Mmm, so what's happening with the lemon? Can
you tell me?) um, he's jumping on it (Oh OK, so he's jumping on it. Who's
594 McKee, McDaniel, and Snedeker

jumping on it?) {Do you remember his name?} no (It's a smurf, right? So
which lemon, IA? One more time, which lemon am I supposed to pick up?)
this one (And which one is "this one"?) this one (Which one is "this one",
can you tell me—) this one (Umm, 1 can't see anything. So I wonder which
one is the right one.) that one (Which one is "that one"? What's happening
in the story?) he's pointing to it (Yeah, so Jerry's pointing to one of the
lemons, right?) yeah (Which lemon is Jerry pointing to?) that one (And which
one is "that one"?) the one that he's jumping on. full RC
LA 3;8: the wu—the boy who—dat's stomping on de lemon {Oh, look care-
ful, look careful!} (Should I pick up a boy or a lemon?) a lemon (And which
lemon should I pick up?) a boy dat—it—the boys that—the boy that's jumping
on it (OK; and should I pick up the lemon?) yeah (So which one? Cause
there's two lemons, right?) yeah (And which one should I pick up?) this one
(And which one is "this one"?) the... boy that's jumping on it. full RC
(head error)

THE ELEPHANTS THAT THE GORILLA IS PETTING

VA 3;1: ??? (What are they?) elephants (And which elephants should I pick
up?) those two elephants (Which two?) those ones (But which ones? There's
four elephants and I'm only supposed to pick up two of 'em.) these two (And
what's happening, can you tell me? Which two elephants.. .to pick up?) these
ones (What about "these ones"?) {Can you tell her something about the
story?} patting. . .the gorilla's patting the elephants (Yeah, so which two el-
ephants should I pick up?) those ones ("Those ones".. .so which ones?) those
ones (OK, I'm gonna uncover my eyes. I don't know which ones to pick up
cause "those ones" doesn't help me if my eyes are covered. Can you use
some more words? Can you think of another way to say .. .) those ones the
gorilla's patting, zero-complementizer RC
CO 3;9: deez ones (Wh—what what are their names? What's the name of
'em?) elephants (So I should pick up two elephants?) yeah m—da ones my
hands are crossed on (But I can't see your hands. CO—So can you tell me,
you know, about the story? Like which two elephants from the story?) dis
one.. .dis one and dis one (And uhm.. . .What's happening?) da gorilla's pet-
ting 'em (So which two elephants should I pick up?) deez (Which ones are
"these"?) uhm da ones da gorillas are pe—dat gorilla is petting, zero-com-
plementizer RC
AZ 3;8: these two (What are they called?) elephants (So I'm supposed to pick
up two elephants? Is that right, AZ?) yeah (Which two elephants?) these two
(And which two are "these two"?) the gorilla is poi—petting two.. .their
bottoms (Yeah, and so which two shall I pick up?) these two (Can you tell
me which two with some more words?) uhm these two (The ones....) wif
the gorilla petting its bottom, reduced RC
Relatives Children Say 595

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