Complexity in the acquisition of Relative Clauses from School-age sequential Mandarin-Italian bilingual children

The study investigates the comprehension of Mandarin and Italian relative clauses in sequential Mandarin–Italian bilingual children aged 6–9 and their age-matched monolingual counterparts. We tested 153 children through character-sentence matching tasks. The results showed that bilingual children comprehended subject relatives much better than object relatives in both languages, similar to their monolingual peers, but their accuracy rates in both relative clauses were much lower than their monolingual peers’. In addition, they had difficulty in comprehending Mandarin subject relatives, but not Italian subject relatives. Moreover, Italian object relative clauses with a postverbal subject were particularly challenging for bilingual children and no improvement across age groups was observed. We propose that learning two languages may slow down the acquisition of each language for complex structures such as relative clauses, but it does not affect the qualitative aspects of development