Linguistic development and teaching Portuguese as a mother tongue: asymmetries in the understanding of subject and object relative clauses

Abstract

Studies in language acquisition show that relative clauses are a domain in which children exhibit difficulties. As found in other languages, a subject-object asymmetry has been found for European Portuguese both in production and in comprehension. On the other hand, studies in educational linguistics assessing Portuguese school age children suggest that difficulties with relative clauses can be found along basic education. As in these studies, this paper extends the study of subject and object relative clauses to school age children. Starting from Batalha (2017), we present a pre/posttest design study that assessed the linguistic knowledge of 91 students in grades 4, 6 and 8 on the understanding of referential dependencies with the relative pronoun que in subject and object restrictive relative clauses. The findings, which were obtained using a reading task that required the identification of antecedents of relative pronouns, are discussed from the point of view of educational linguistics, considering some of the implications of the study for Portuguese L1 teaching.