The acquisition order of English relative clauses by native speakers of Kiswahili

This study attempts to examine the acquisition order of English relative clauses by Tanzanian native speakers of Kiswahili. It also deals with the errors made by these learners in forming relative clauses on English grammatical relations. The data for this study were collected by using a sentence combination task and a grammaticality judgement task. Also, a total of 45 Form 5 students who speak Kiswahili as their native language were involved in the present study as respondents. The findings indicate that to a greater extent the native speakers of Kiswahili who participated in this study follow the predictions of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (the NPAH) in the acquisition of English relative clauses. But the majority seem to have acquired genitive relative clauses earlier than direct object relative clauses and others higher in the hierarchy. This finding poses a challenge to the NPAH, the theoretical framework used in this study. The NPAH predicts that subject relative clauses will be acquired first, followed by direct object relative clauses, indirect object relative clauses, object of preposition (oblique) relative clauses, genitive relative clauses and finally by object of comparison relative clauses. The findings also show that the respondents made errors in forming relative clauses on the English grammatical relations that are said to be complex.