Abstract: One of the important tasks in psycholinguistic literature is to explore the innate mechanisms and the universal principles guiding parsing in sentence processing. To explore whether 3~6 years old children have the ability to utilize semantic cues in comprehension of relative clauses or not, 120 children were recruited in the study. The study employed a 2×2×3 mixed design, with RC type (SRC vs.ORC), the configuration of animacy of the head nouns (animaicy-inanimacy vs. inanimacy-animacy) as within-subject factors, and grade (one vs. two vs. three) as between-subject factors. The data were addressed using general logistic mixed effect regression model (GLMER) and the results indicated that the main effect of grade was significant, but no significant differences were found for type of sentences and animacy of the head nouns. There were significant interactions between type of sentence and grades, simple analyses showed that no significances were found between SRCs and ORCs for grade 1 and grade 2, but for grade 3, there were significant differences between SRCs and ORCs. The three-way sentence×grade×animacy interactions were marginal significant. For children from grade 3, sentences with inanimacy-animacy configuration were more difficult to process than sentences with animacy-inanimacy configuration under conditions of ORCs, but under conditions of SRCs, sentences with inanimacy-animacy configuration were easier to comprehend than sentences with animacy-inanimacy configuration. Under conditions of inanimacy-animacy configuration, children from grade 1 have more difficult in comprehending SRCs compared to children from grade 2 and 3, but no significant differences were found between grade 2 and 3. On the other hand, under conditions of animacy-inanimacyconfiguration, no significant differences were found in comprehending ORCs between grade 1 and grade 2, but their accuracy was lower than children from grade 3.In conclusion, this paper firstly found that 3~4 years old children from China have the ability to comprehend RCs with simple structure, but until about 6 years old, they could utilize the semantic cues in comprehension of RCs.

Key words: Chinese, relative clause, aniamcy, preschool child