Relative clauses (RCs), with their typological universality and structural complexity, have always been central to inquiries in generative linguistics and language acquisition. Although recent years witness a growing interest in psycholinguistic and acquisition research in Chinese RCs, few studies have attempted to make connections between psycholinguistic theories and Chinese as a second language learning and teaching. This paper tries to bridge the gap and uses an interdisciplinary approach to address the comparative difficulty of Chinese subject and object RCs in their interaction with demonstratives. Chinese L1 and L2 participants completed a written sentence completion task. More productions in a certain type of RC, when observed in both participant groups, were interpreted as evidence of structural preference, and differences between L1 and L2 patterns were analyzed as competence issues. It was found that both groups prefer subject RCs when the structure begins with a demonstrative, and this result corresponds to corpus studies of Chinese RCs as well as findings in previous acquisition research. At the same time, there was no asymmetry between the subject and object RCs produced when the demonstrative follows the RC. A multi-constraint model in which a “perspective” factor (MacWhinney 1977, 1982, MacWhinney and Pleh (1988) and a word order factor simultaneously contribute to production cost can explain the data. Meanwhile, L2 participants’ errors were often related to neglecting the obligatory gap within the RC. Pedagogical implications were put forward.

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