The Acquisition of Relative Pronouns: A Case Study of Moroccan Children

Abstract

The understanding of complex sentences by children acquiring their mother tongue has attracted many psycholinguists who have attempted to understand why children find some sentences more difficult to comprehend than others. The study investigated the acquisition of relative pronouns-‘which’, ‘that’, and ‘who’-by Moroccan children aged between 3 and 5. It also examined their understanding of the four different relative clauses: SS, OO, SO, and OS. The study lasted six weeks and used two methodological tasks: imitation and acting out. In the imitation experiment, participants were asked to repeat some model sentences and to retell a story. In the acting-out experiment, participants were asked to act out some model sentences using toy animals. The results revealed that Moroccan children do not follow the same order of acquisition as that of English children. On the other hand, it was noticed that, like English children, they find SS and OO sentences easier to understand than OS and SO sentences because of the same function of the head NP in the matrix clause and the relative clause in both SS and OO sentences.