Strategies in the Comprehension of Relative Clauses

An experiment is described to test the hypothesis that errors in the comprehension of relative clauses in English are caused by perceptual strategies resorted to when the normal capacity of the processing channel is exceeded. Native children, foreign adults, and native adults were asked to show Subject and Object relations in sentences that were read to them. The same type of error pattern was found in native children and foreign adults with single embedded clauses, in native adults with double embedded clauses, and, to a lesser extent, in native adults with single embedded clauses. The dominating strategies appeared to be that the first Noun Phrase was the Subject and the Noun Phrase following the verb the Object. These results suggest that the difficulty of relative clauses is indeed due to the load they put on the processing system and that an overload is reached with a single embedding for children and foreign adults, and with a double embedding for most native adults.