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The paper tests whether children’s responses reflect processing limitations or grammatical knowledge, comparing gapped relative clauses and examining effects of verb type and aspect.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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with?","Question",{"text":63,"@type":64},"The study focuses on filler-gap dependencies, especially relative clauses, and how comprehension is affected by the distance of the dependency.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"Why might Marathi children differ from the commonly reported subject advantage?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"Marathi has split-ergative alignment and multiple relative clause strategies, so the usual subject-vs-object asymmetry predicted by Accessibility Hierarchy may be less prevalent.",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"What do the findings show about children’s comprehension of relative clauses in Marathi?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"Marathi children do not show a subject advantage, but they show better performance with stative verbs compared with eventive transitive 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dependencies, in particular relative clauses (RCs), are a widely studied area in syntax, largely because they show cross-linguistic asymmetries in processing due to the distance of the dependency. This has often been explained using Keenan & Comrie’s Accessibility Hierarchy (1977), arguing that positions higher in the hierarchy (i.e. Subjects) are easier to process than positions lower in the hierarchy (i.e. Objects) . However, in languages with non-canonical subjects and objects like Marathi, this asymmetry may not be as prevalent. In this study, we find that rather than a subject advantage, Marathi children’s behavioral responses were affected by verb-type. We explore questions of whether these facts are best understood through the lens of processing issues versus grammatical knowledge.  \nLau & Tanaka (2021), in their meta-analysis of the subject advantage in relative clauses, show an overall ease in the processing of Subject RCs (SRCs) as compared to Object RCs (ORCs).They do point out that specific languages show differences depending on their features. For example, languages with ergative alignment and ergative subjects may prevent SRC formation due to difficulties in extracting an ergative argument outside of its clause. Thus, the subject relative clause advantage is not ubiquitous, but is (in part) dependent on particular grammatical features of individual languages.  \nIn this paper we examine RC comprehension in Marathi, a split-ergative language from India. Crucially, Marathi has both accusative (NOM-ACC) alignment and ergative (ERG-ABS) alignment, and two relative clause formation strategies: a (more frequent) gapped RC and a (less frequent but more applicable) correlative construction (Damle, 1965; Pandharipande, 1997) . We specifically  \n*  \nAnupama Reddy, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, [reddyab@hawaii.edu. Kamil](reddyab@hawaii.edu. Kamil)[ ](reddyab@hawaii.edu. Kamil)Deen, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, [kamil@hawaii.edu](kamil@hawaii.edu).  \nSpecial thanks to Ruchi Mhasane for designing the visual stimuli, Shubhangi Ratnaparkhi and Sulabha Athavale for their native speaker judgments in designing the experimental materials, the students and teachers at the Learning Home School, Aksharnandan, Anandakshan, Kilbil Primary School, Angelz Paradise, and Periwinkle Nursery and Play Group for their participation and support. We are grateful to William O’Grady and Shin Fukuda for their insights, and to Nozomi Tanaka for sharing her paradigm materials and thoughts. We also appreciate all the feedback from the Language Acquisition Research Group and the Experimental and Theoretical Syntax Research Group at UH Mānoa. This research was funded by the Jagdish P. Sharma Foundation and the Bilinski Foundation Summer Research Scholarship.  \n© 2026 Anupama Reddy and Kamil Deen. Proceedings of the 50th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. Romi Hill et al., 654-667. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.  \n655  \nfocus on the gapped RC, as the more frequent, though limited, construction, and investigate if Marathi children show similar the now-familiar asymmetry in comprehension between SRCs and ORCs. As Marathi is a split ergative language, we test both the imperfective (NOM-ACC) and perfective (ERG-ABS) aspects, as well as a quirky-case phenomenon of stative verbs (DAT-NOM in both aspects) . Our findings indicate that Marathi children do NOT show a subjectadvantage, though do show better performance with stative verbs. We speculate that this may be due to less computation required in the RC formulation for stative verbs over eventive transitive verbs.  \n1. Background  \nRelative clauses, a type of filler-gap dependency, are widely studied in syntactic literature (Alexiadou et al., 2000; de Vries, 2002; others) in part because they offer a unique opportunity to test theories of long-distance dependency processing","cbCaiub4tULAAQVl","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiub4tULAAQVl","pdf",527238,15,"English","# Background\n## Filler-gap dependencies and relative clauses\n## Accessibility Hierarchy and subject advantage\n## Marathi split-ergative properties\n## Study design and predicted asymmetries","[{\"question\":\"What linguistic phenomenon is the study mainly concerned with?\",\"answer\":\"The study focuses on filler-gap dependencies, especially relative clauses, and how comprehension is affected by the distance of the dependency.\"},{\"question\":\"Why might Marathi children differ from the commonly reported subject advantage?\",\"answer\":\"Marathi has split-ergative alignment and multiple relative clause strategies, so the usual subject-vs-object asymmetry predicted by Accessibility Hierarchy may be less prevalent.\"},{\"question\":\"What do the findings show about children’s comprehension of relative clauses in Marathi?\",\"answer\":\"Marathi children do not show a subject advantage, but they show better performance with stative verbs compared with eventive transitive verbs.\"}]","Child Comprehension of Marathi Gapped Relative Clauses | PDF",38]