Persian speaking children's acquisition of relative clauses

The current study examined the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Persian is a relatively unique data point in crosslinguistic research in acquisition because it is a head-final language with post-nominal RCs. Children (N = 51) aged 2 to 7 years completed a pictureselection task that tested their comprehension of subject-, object-, and genitive- RCs. The results showed that the children experienced greater difficulty processing object and genitive RCs when compared to subject RCs, suggesting that the children have particular difficulty processing sentences with noncanonical word order. The results are discussed with reference to a number of theoretical accounts proposed to account for sentence difficulty.