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UNIVERSALS IN RELATIVE CLAUSE ACQUISITION: EVIDENCE FROM CHILD AND ADULT L1 AND L2 LEARNERS OF HINDI‐URDU
Author(s) -
Hansen Lynne
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1986.tb00376.x
Subject(s) - hindi , linguistics , psychology , problem of universals , relative clause , linguistic universal , urdu , noun , indo european languages , word order , second language acquisition , first language , theoretical linguistics , philosophy
In the search for universals of relative clause acquisition, the present research investigated the comprehension of six types of Hindi‐Urdu correlative sentences by child and adult L1 and L2 learners. Group comparisons show a sharper distinction between the performance of the first and second language learners than between the children and adults. While the native speakers tend to pay attention to case markers in interpreting sentences, the English‐speaking learners tend to ignore these morphological cues, relying rather on a word order heuristic. The L1 errors, particularly those of the adults, are more systematic than the L2. Many of the learners do not appear to have any functional strategy for discovering the missing noun complement in the Hindi‐Urdu correlative clauses and instead resort to random guessing. The paper concludes that language universals are available for the processing of complex structures only once a certain level of proficiency has been attained.