We report on an eye-tracking study that investigated four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of subject and object relative clauses (RCs). Children's eye-movements were recorded as they listened to RC structures identifying a unique referent (e.g. "Can you pick up the horse that pushed the pig?"). Two RC types, classifier (CL) and ge3 RCs, were tested in a between-participants design. The two RC types differ in their syntactic analyses and frequency of occurrence, providing an important point of comparison for theories of RC acquisition and processing. A permutation analysis showed that the two structures were processed differently: CL RCs showed a significant object-over-subject advantage, whereas ge3 RCs showed the opposite effect. This study shows that children can have different preferences even for two very similar RC structures within the same language, suggesting that syntactic processing preferences are shaped by the unique features of particular constructions both within and across different linguistic typologies.
The current study investigated the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) in bilingual Mandarin–English children (N = 55, Mage = 7 years, 5 months [7;5], SD = 1;8) and language-matched monolingual Mandarin-speaking children (N = 59, Mage = 5;4, SD = 0;7). The children completed a picture-referent selection task that tested their comprehension of subject and object RCs, and standardized assessments of vocabulary knowledge. Results showed a very similar pattern of responding in both groups. In comparison to past studies of Cantonese, the bilingual and monolingual children both showed a significant subject-over-object RC advantage. An error analysis suggested that the children’s difficulty with object RCs reflected the tendency to interpret the sentential subject as the head noun. A subsequent corpus analysis suggested that children’s difficulty with object RCs may be in part due to distributional information favoring subject RC analyses. Individual differences analyses suggested crosslinguistic transfer from English to Mandarin in the bilingual children at the individual but not the group level, with the results indicating that comparative English dominance makes children vulnerable to error.
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. 'The mother that bought the toy' (2) [ RC ma1ma mai3] de wan2ju4 Object-Extracted DE mother buy de toy 'The toy that mother bought.' (3) [ RC mai3 wan2ju4]de na4 ge4 ma1ma Subject-Extracted DCL buy toy de that CL mother 'The mother that bought the toy' (4) [ RC ma1ma mai3] de na4 ge4 wan2ju4 Object-Extracted DCL mother buy de that CL toy 'The toy that mother bought' Sentences (1) and (3) are subject-extracted RCs because the RC modifies the grammatical subject (the mother), whereas sentences (2) and (4) are object-extracted because the RC modifies the grammatical object. Crucially, in (1) and (2) the head noun, introduced by the nominaliser de, is bare (henceforth 'DE-RCs'). In contrast, the head noun in (3) and (4) is introduced by the demonstrative (DEM) + classifier (CL) combination (henceforth 'DCL-RCs'). These two RC types have different discourse-functional properties (Chen, Ming, & Jiang, 2015), and there is debate regarding their structural differences (Cheng &
IntroductionStudies have documented that child experiences such as external/environmental factors as well as internal factors jointly affect acquisition outcomes in child language. Thus far, the findings have been heavily skewed toward Indo-European languages and children in the Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies. By contrast, this study features an understudied minority language Kam, and a group of so-called left-behind children in China growing up in a unique social-communicative environment.MethodsFifty-five bilingual children aged 5–9 acquiring Kam as home language were assessed using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS MAIN). Twenty-three “two parents-left” children (mean age = 6;8, range: 5;0–9;2) remained in rural areas while both parents went to cities for employment, and they were raised by their grandparents. Thirty-two were “one parent-left” peers (mean age = 7;3, range: 5;0–9;3) who also resided in rural areas but were raised by one parent. Oral narrative texts were analysed for macrostructure based on story structure (SS), story complexity (SC) and internal state terms (IS). The study examined whether and how narrative production is predicted by internal factors such as chronological age and linguistic proficiency of a child and an external factor such as left-behind experience. Four measures were scored as outcome measures: SS, SC, IS type, IS token. Four measures were taken as predictors: chronological age, left-behind experience, scores in a lexical production task, and scores in a sentence repetition task tapping expressive morphosyntactic competence.ResultsResults showed that left-behind experience consistently predicted all four outcome measures, where the “two parents-left” children scored significantly lower than their “one parent-left” peers. Expressive vocabulary scores predicted three measures: SS, SC, and IS Token. Expressive morphosyntactic scores predicted SS and SC. Age, by contrast, did not predict any outcome measure.DiscussionThese findings suggested that being left-behind by both parents may be a negative prognostic indicator for the development and maintenance of heritage language abilities in ethnic minority children. We further discussed the conceptual significance of what it means for a child to be left-behind, by relating to more basic external factors in language development, including caregiver educational level, and amount of home language and literacy support by the caretakers.
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