The Acquisition of English Restrictive Relative Clauses by Native Speakers of Persian

This study examines the Persians' comprehension ability in processing different types of English restrictive relative clauses. A comprehension experiment with 50 Iranians was conducted to search for the universal linguistic factors responsible for the ease or difficulty of these sentences. Three hypotheses were evaluated--Interruption, Word Order Re-arrangement, and Parallel Function. The results of the experiment support two of the hypotheses, i.e., Interruption and Word Order Re-arrangement cause difficulty in the comprehension of relative clauses. This finding is consistent with those of Sheldon (1977) for adult English speakers and Houston (1978) for the Saudis. For the Arabs, unlike Iranians, Parallel Function was found to be significant.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Sadighi, Firooz

• Language, Linguistics
• Education, Secondary

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8218554

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/68808