The Onset of Relativization in the Young Child

In this chapter we review the essential highlights from previous cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of relativization. Specifically, we review studies that are relevant to the acquisition of headedness at earliest stages of complex sentence formation in the child. The preponderance of this research is based on observations of natural speech samples. This review reveals an absence of headedness in early child attempts at relativization, and a variety of evidence supporting children’s early creation of headless relativization. We suggest that these early data cohere with our leading hypothesis and with the proposed UG template.