The Anatomy of a Syntactic Variable in Later Childhood: Evidence from Relative Clause Constructions

Drawing on community-based speech data representing Canadian English, this study operationalizes a number of structural measures to track the evolution of relative clause constructions (RCCs) in the speech of 4 to 12-year-old children, effecting additional comparisons with a commensurate adult baseline variety. Embedded in a comparative sociolinguistic framework, quantitative analyses reveal the structural diversity of RCCs in the speech of children and adults, belying any expectation that vernacular RCCs adhere closely to the ‘prototype’ constructions that figure prominently in the experimental literature. Constructional parallels in the RCCs produced by older children and adults are interpreted as evidence of children’s attunement to distributional regularities and frequency effects in the community-based speech to which they are exposed, whereas structural discontinuities between those groups confirm that the acquisition of RCCs is developmentally protracted. Key findings of the study indicate that systematic quantitative analysis of community-based speech data can leverage new insights into the structural expansion of RCCs in middle to later childhood and suggest that children’s sensitivity to particular constructional preferences in ambient adult speech shapes their acquisition of English RCCs.