Children's production of relative clauses in Palestinian Arabic: Unique errors and their movement account

•We report unique errors in the acquisition of relative clauses in Palestinian Arabic.•The errors are shown to be due to the derivation of Arabic relative clauses.•Head-doubling in relative clauses is accounted for using the matching analysis.

This study tests empirically several hypotheses formulated for the learning trajectory of Palestinian Arabic relative clauses and the errors the process might involve. Findings from elicited production of children acquiring Palestinian Arabic relative clauses show that like in other languages, subject relatives are acquired first, and that among the non-subject relatives a certain gradation obtains with the prepositional relatives being acquired later than the non-prepositional ones. As to the errors attested in the process, the findings confirm that in addition to the familiar resumptive DP error (DP doubling), acquisition of these structures in Palestinian Arabic involves a couple of errors which, to our knowledge, have never been documented in the acquisition of relative clauses across languages. We argue that these errors, referred to as “subject fronting” and “complementizer doubling”, are due to the nature of the adult derivation of relative clauses in the language as viewed by Aoun and Choueiri (1996), rather than by Shlonsky (1992), and propose a concrete account thereof. Finally, we account for the resumptive DP error across languages, including Palestinian Arabic, using the ‘matching analysis’ of Sauerland, 1998 and Sauerland, 2002.