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<p>Although Mandarin is an S(ubject)V(erb)O(bject) language, other non-canonical sentences with the object marker <i>ba</i> are also possible, yet their comprehension in child Mandarin is underexplored. This study uses eye-tracking and the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, as well as the use of pseudo-verbs, to explore how 24 Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.5 months) and 48 adults process these structures. The results of our experiments show that both infants and adults looked longer at the target scenes for the three grammatical sentence types tested: SVO, S<i>ba</i>OV and O, S<i>ba</i>OV. While comprehension of SVO and S<i>ba</i>OV could be achieved with an <span>agent-</span>first parsing strategy, the fact that <span>patient</span>-first O, S<i>ba</i>OV constructions were also parsed by infants suggests access to grammatical, language-specific knowledge.</p>

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Early acquisition of complex syntax in Mandarin-speaking infants

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年5月17日

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  • Jingtao Zhu,
  • Anna Gavarró

摘要

Although Mandarin is an S(ubject)V(erb)O(bject) language, other non-canonical sentences with the object marker ba are also possible, yet their comprehension in child Mandarin is underexplored. This study uses eye-tracking and the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, as well as the use of pseudo-verbs, to explore how 24 Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.5 months) and 48 adults process these structures. The results of our experiments show that both infants and adults looked longer at the target scenes for the three grammatical sentence types tested: SVO, SbaOV and O, SbaOV. While comprehension of SVO and SbaOV could be achieved with an agent-first parsing strategy, the fact that patient-first O, SbaOV constructions were also parsed by infants suggests access to grammatical, language-specific knowledge.