| The purpose of this study was to investigate whether differences in syntactic structure of relative clauses in Chinese and English correspond with differences in logical reasoning strategies. In acquiring a language a child comes to adopt a particular framework for schematizing experience which in turn affects logical reasoning strategies (Slobin, 1984).; A relative clause (RC) is a sentence that specifies a subset of a larger set (the domain) of objects or entities (Keenan & Comrie, 1977) and can be seen as a part-to-whole logical operation. The relative clause word order reflects the logic operation underlying the sentence. For English language speakers, it is a whole-to-part logical operation whereas for Chinese language speakers, it is a part-to-whole logical operation. It was expected that After being accustomed to part-whole relative clause processing, when facing a logic task, Chinese speakers would habitually first pay attention to parts, and the English speakers would notice the whole pattern of the stimuli material first.; The effects of relative clauses on logical reasoning are assessed through three tasks: a relative clause comprehension task, a verbal logical task and a non-verbal logical task. Eighty children from Taiwan and US participated in this study. The results indicated that both language groups were able to perform all three tasks but not in the same speed nor in the same manner. These two language groups have different reasoning patterns, that is, the Taiwanese children tended to notice internal details (parts) of the stimulus figures first, whereas, the American subjects tended to notice the overall (whole) pattern first. |
