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The child heard a coordinated sentence and wondered: On children’s
difficulty in understanding coordination and relative clauses with
crossing dependencies
Naama Friedmann a, Joa˜o Costa b,*
a Language and Brain Lab, School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
b Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Departamento de Linguı´stica, Av. de Berna, 26C, 1069-061 Lisbon, Portugal
1. Introduction
The scientist tested the boy and smiled. Who smiled? Whereas the readers of this article might think that the scientist did,
young children sometimes think it was the boy. This kind of structure is the focus of this study.
Many studies report that in the course of normal language acquisition, children find it difficult to understand relative
clauses, especially object relatives, until the age of 5–6 years (Adams, 1990; Berman, 1997; Brown, 1972; Correa, 1982, 1995;
Lingua 120 (2010) 1502–1515
A R T I C L E I N F O
Article history:
Keywords:Acquisition Coordination Relative clauses
Hebrew
European Portuguese
Syntax
A B S T R A C T
Children are known to have problems in understanding Wh-movement constructions in
which the object moves across an overt subject (as is the case in object relatives, Wh-object
questions, and topicalization). To test whether crossing dependencies are also problematic
when no Wh-movement is involved and whether dependencies in which the subject crosses
an object are also difficult, we test a construction that has not been studied before, a
coordination sentence like The girl kissed the boy and went to the beach. This structure includes
a dependency – between theempty subject of went to the beach and the girl. This dependency
crosses the object the boy.We tested the comprehension of this construction in comparison
with coordination that does not involve a dependency, andwith coordination that includes a
dependency without intervention. We also compared it with relative clauses with and
without intervention, object relatives and subject relatives, respectively. We ran five
experiments to assess the comprehension of these structures and the correlation between
them. Experiments 1 and 2 tested sentence-picture matching in 49 3;4 to 5;5 year old
Hebrew- and European-Portuguese-speaking children; Experiments 3 and 4 used
comprehension questions in 41 3;6 to 5;6 year old Hebrew- and European-Portuguesespeaking
children. Experiment 5 tested the correlations between the structures in 69 schoolage
children. The main findings were that children performed poorly on the comprehension
of sentences containing crossing dependency coordination, in all 5 experiments, and in both
languages. Their difficulty in the crossing dependency coordination was similar to their
difficultywith object relatives, and their performance on crossing dependency coordination
correlated with that of object relatives. Their performance on coordination without
dependency, coordination with a dependency but without crossing, and subject relatives
was good. We conclude that crossing dependencies, not only in Wh-movement
dependencies, underlie the difficulty in young children’s sentence comprehension.

2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +351 21 7908300; fax: +351 21 7908308.
E-mail addresses: naamafr@post.tau.ac.il (N. Friedmann), jcosta@fcsh.unl.pt (J. Costa).
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