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Mandarin-speaking three-year-olds' demonstration of productive knowledge of syntax: evidence from syntactic productivity and structural priming with the SVO-ba alternation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2013

DONG-BO HSU
DONG-BO HSU*
Affiliation:
National Taiwan Normal University – Department of Chinese as a Second Language
*
Address for correspondence: Dong-Bo Hsu, Department of Chinese as a Second Language, National Taiwan Normal University, No. 162 Section 1 Heping East Road, Daan District, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC. e-mail: dhsu2@ntnu.edu.tw
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Abstract

Two studies investigated syntactic productivity in three-year-old Mandarin speakers' use of verbs in the SVO and SbaOV constructions. In Study 1, children were taught novel verbs in one construction and assessed for their production in the other construction. Children produced verbs taught in the ba constructions in SVO utterances, but showed order effects when producing verbs taught in SVO constructions in ba utterances. In Study 2, children described animated scenes either with structural priming (i.e., after hearing verbs in SVO or ba constructions). Children demonstrated structural priming, producing more SVO and ba utterances, respectively, directly after hearing verbs in these constructions. These results indicate that Mandarin speaking three-year-olds demonstrate productive knowledge of both SVO and SbaOV constructions. Their ability to override the predominant input frequency of SVO runs counter to a purely usage-based account of early acquisition of grammar.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 1115 - 1146
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

I would like to thank the children who took part in the study, their parents, and the staff. I am grateful to Jiayi Chen, Yushan Chou, Guozhong Fu, Lirong, Li, Yingchun Wu, Shiny Yang, and Wangrong Yin for their help in testing, collecting data, coding data, and reliability checking. I am also particularly thankful to the editor and associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers, for their precious time and comments that improved this manuscript greatly. All remaining errors are of course my own. My gratitude also goes to the Academic Paper Editing Clinic, NTNU. I am also thankful to the grants from Aims for the Top University program of the Ministry of Education, Taiwan and for the National Science Council (NSC99-2410-H-003-077 and NSC101-2410-H-003-067) of Taiwan. Without their support, such a publication would be next to impossible.

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