Four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children’s online comprehension of relative clauses

A core question in language acquisition is whether children’s syntactic processing is experience-dependent and language-specific, or whether it is governed by abstract, universal syntactic machinery. We address this question by presenting corpus and on-line processing dat a from children learning Ma...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2020-03, Vol.196, p.104103-104103, Article 104103
Main Authors: Yang, Wenchun, Chan, Angel, Chang, Franklin, Kidd, Evan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Child, Preschool
Children
Children & youth
Chinese languages
Comprehension
Corpus linguistics
Humans
Information processing
Language
Language acquisition
Language Development
Learning
Listening comprehension
Mandarin
Native language acquisition
On-line processing
Parsing
Permutation analysis
Relative clauses
Sheep
Speech Perception
Syntactic processing
Syntactic structures
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Summary:A core question in language acquisition is whether children’s syntactic processing is experience-dependent and language-specific, or whether it is governed by abstract, universal syntactic machinery. We address this question by presenting corpus and on-line processing dat a from children learning Mandarin Chinese, a language that has been important in debates about the universality of parsing processes. The corpus data revealed that two different relative clause constructions in Mandarin are differentially used to modify syntactic subjects and objects. In the experiment, 4-year-old children’s eye-movements were recorded as they listened to the two RC construction types (e.g., Can you pick up the pig that pushed the sheep?). A permutation analysis showed that children’s ease of comprehension was closely aligned with the distributional frequencies, suggesting syntactic processing preferences are shaped by the input experience of these constructions.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104103