Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

A widely attested finding across languages is that object relative clauses pose more difficulties for comprehension than subject relative clauses, both for children and adults. This subject-object asymmetry in comprehension is reduced, or even eliminated, when the subject embedded in the relative clause is a pronoun, rather than a lexical noun phrase. In this talk I will present a series of studies with French-speaking children aimed to explore whether all pronouns have the same effect on comprehension; whether this effect holds both when a pronoun is the head or the subject of the object relative; as well as whether the pronoun facilitation is driven by discourse properties of pronouns or structural (syntactic) factors. I will show that this facilitation arises only when there is a mismatch in fine-grained phi-features between the pronoun and the lexical noun phrase.