THE EFFECT OF LOCAL AND GLOBAL CUES ON THE COMPREHENSION OF PERSIAN PSEUDOCLEFTS

This study investigated the effect of canonical word order as a global cue and resumption as a local cue on the comprehension of Persian pseudoclefts. Nineteen (N = 19) monolingual Persian speaking children aged between 31 and 79 months were recruited from a kindergarten. Using a picture selection task consisting of 27 items including subject pseudoclefts, object pseudoclefts with resumptive pronoun, object pseudoclefts with resumptive clitic, and gapped object pseudoclefts. The results showed that subject pseudoclefts which have a canonical word order were comprehended more accurately than different object pseudoclefts and that resumptive elements did not have a significant effect on the comprehension of object pseudoclefts. The results are discussed with reference to current theories of sentence processing.