Acquisition of Recursive Possessives and Recursive Locatives in Mandarin

As recursion has been underlying any linguistic work for the last 60 years, the acquisition of recursive structures by children during language learning has become a focal point of inquiry. This study delves into the developmental trajectory of Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of recursive possessives and locatives, assessing the impact of structural diversity on language acquisition. The research contrasts the comprehension of two-level recursive structures among children aged 3 to 7 years, employing answering question while seeing a picture task to elicit responses. The findings indicate that children do not attain adult-like proficiency in two-level recursion until the age of 6, and there exists a notable asymmetry in the acquisition of recursive possessives versus locatives. These results underscore the primacy of structural complexity and cognitive factors in the acquisition process, enhancing our comprehension of the cognitive foundations of language development and the pivotal role of recursion in child language acquisition.

The syntax-semantics interface in a child's path: A study of 3- to 11-year-olds' elicited production of Mandarin recursive relative clauses

There have been apparently conflicting claims over the syntax-semantics relationship in child acquisition. However, few of them have assessed the child's path toward the acquisition of recursive relative clauses (RRCs). The authors of the current paper did experiments to investigate 3- to 11-year-olds' most-structured elicited production of eight Mandarin RRCs in a 4 (syntactic types)*2 (semantic conditions) design. The four syntactic types were RRCs with a subject-gapped RC embedded in an object-gapped RC (SORRCs), RRCs with an object-gapped RC embedded in another object-gapped RC (OORRCs), RRCs with an object-gapped RC embedded in a subject-gapped RC (OSRRCs), and RRCs with a subject-gapped RC embedded in another subject-gapped RC (SSRRCs). Each syntactic type was put in two conditions differing in internal semantics: irreversible internal semantics (IIS) and reversible internal semantics (RIS). For example, "the balloon that [the girl that _ eats the banana] holds _" is SORRCs in the IIS condition; "the monkey that [the dog that _ bites the pig] hits_" is SORRCs in the RIS condition. For each target, the participants were provided with a speech-visual stimulus constructing a condition of irreversible external semantics (IES). The results showed that SSRRCs, OSRRCs and SORRCs in the IIS-IES condition were produced two years earlier than their counterparts in the RIS-IES condition. Thus, a 2-stage development path is proposed: the language acquisition device starts with the interface between (irreversible) syntax and IIS, and ends with the interface between syntax and IES, both abiding by the syntax-semantic interface principle.