A Uniform Acquisitional Path for Linguistic Recursion
Evidence from the Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese DeP Recursion
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rtcfl.26394Keywords:
recursion acquisition, developmental path, Chinese DeP recursion, Chinese-speaking childrenAbstract
While children’s acquisition of recursion has drawn extensive attention in the field, there is less research offering proper evidence for the uniform developmental path of linguistic recursion. To address this issue cross-linguistically, this study examines how 84 Mandarin-speaking children aged between three and six comprehend two to four-level DeP recursion through a pointing task. The results reveal that two and three-level DeP recursion is successfully generated by four-year-old children first, and then five-year-old children fully master four-level DeP recursion. The findings are consistent with the developmental route-map of Japanese children’s acquisition of recursive possessives. Meanwhile, the analysis shows that the biological maturation of the recursive mechanism and the enhancement of computational efficiency of the linguistic mechanism mainly account for the step-by-step development.
References
Mao, T. Y. (2021) Investigation of L2/Ln pragmatic competence: Its core and route-map. Frontiers in Psychology, Language Sciences 12: 1–26.
Mao, T. Y. (2020) Redefining pragmatic competence among modular interactions and beyond. Intercultural Pragmatics 17(5): 605–631.
Mao, T. Y. and Meng, F. J. (2016) The cartographic project of the generative enterprise – An interview with Guglielmo Cinque. Language and Linguistics 17(6): 917–936.
Berwick, R. C. and Chomsky, N. (2016) Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (2002) New Horizons in the Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, N. (2017). Two notions of modularity. In R. G. de Almeida and L. R. Gleitman (eds) On Concepts, Modules, and Language: Cognitive Science at Its Core, 25–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chomsky, N. (2023) Language and the miracle creed. Researching and Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language 4: 1–20.
Dékány, É. (2019) Foundations of generative linguistics. Acta Linguistica Academica 66 (3): 309–334.
Fujimori, C. (2010) Acquisition of Recursive Possessives in Japanese. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Hiraga, M. (2010) Acquisition of recursive verbal compound nouns. Paper presented at the 32nd Annual Conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS). Humboldt University, Berlin (24 February 2010).
Hollebrandse, B. and Roeper, T. (2014) Empirical results and formal approaches to recursion in acquisition. In T. Roeper and M. Speas (eds) Recursion: Complexity in Cognition, 179–219. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Huang, C.-T. J. (1982) Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of Grammar. Unpublished PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Li, D., Yang, X., Roeper, T., Wilson, M., Yin, R., Kim, J., Merritt, E., Lopez, D., and Tero, A. (2020) Acquisition of recursion in child Mandarin. In M. M. Brown and A. Kohut (eds) Proceedings of the 44th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 294–307. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Limbach, M. and Adone, D. (2010) Language acquisition of recursive possessives in English. In K. Franich, K. M. Iserman, and L. L. Keil (eds) Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 281–290. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Castilla-Earles, A. P., Béjar, S., and Massam, D. (2012) Elmo’s sister’s ball: the problem of acquiring nominal recursion. Language Acquisition 19 (4): 301–311.
Roeper, T. (2007) The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illuminates Hmanism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rowland, C. F. and Noble, C. L. (2010) The role of syntactic structure in children’s. sentence comprehension: evidence from the dative. Language Learning and Development 7 (1): 55–75.
Shi, J. W., Zhou, P., Giblin, I., and Crain, S. (2019) Recursive possessive constructions. in child language. Foreign Language Teaching and Research 51: 323–333.
Si, F. Z. (2002) The Chinese complementizer ‘De’ and the related syntactic problems. Language Teaching and Linguistic Studies 1: 35–40.
Si, F. Z. (2004) Head theory and DeP in Chinese. Contemporary Linguistics 1: 26–34.
Terunuma, A., Isobe, M., Nakajima, M., Okabe, R., Inada, S., Inokuma, S., and Nakato, T. (2017) Acquisition of recursive possessives and locatives within DPs in Japanese. In M. LaMendola and J. Scott (eds) Proceedings of the 41st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 626–636. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Terunuma, A. and Nakato, T. (2013) Recursive possessives in child Japanese. Paper presented at Recursion in Brazilian Languages and Beyond 2013. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Zhu, D. X. (1961) Shuo ‘De’. In D. X. Zhu (ed.) Studies on Modern Chinese Grammar, 67–103. Peking: Commercial Press.
