ABSTRACT
A procedural model of relative clause (RC) comprehension is sketched on the basis of which current unexplained findings and new experimental data concerning children's relative difficulty in comprehending RCs are analyzed. Several types of sentences with RCs have traditionally been used in comprehension experiments with children. The parsing of RCs has been considered independently of the situation in which it might occur. It is necessary to characterize the specific demands of the different tasks whereby children's comprehension of RCs has been accessed in the light of the model just sketched. Children produce noun phrases (NPs) containing an RC even before they have identified language specific markers of embedding. When sentences are comprehended qua linguistic objects, NPs remain represented in immediate memory as potential referring expressions while the whole sentence is analyzed. As a result, nonsyntactic procedures would determine the subject of the main clause as the antecedent of the subject of the RC verb.
