Bibliographic Details
| Title: |
The sensitivity to pragmatic-conceptual representations in garden path double relatives in L1 Mandarin. |
| Authors: |
Bai, Bing |
| Source: |
Language & Cognition (Cambridge University Press); Mar2025, Vol. 17, p1-23, 23p |
| Subject Terms: |
Language acquisition, Prosodic analysis (Linguistics), Mental representation, Mandarin dialects, Language & languages |
| Abstract: |
The aim of this study is to investigate how pragmatic-conceptual representations can be integrated into theories of first language acquisition. Experiment 1, using a sentence–picture judgment task, examined how children (N = 53, aged 4–6 years) used prosody boundaries as cues for a recursive interpretation when the recursive relatives (i.e., SO and OO)1 were garden path structures. The results showed that children below six-year had a stronger preference for recursive reading than adults under the conjunction-biased prosody condition and that children after six years of birth exhibited an adult-like preference for recursive readings under the recursion-biased prosody condition. Experiment 2 explored whether and how reversibility (e.g., "a dog eats a banana" vs "a dog kisses a cat") in the action schema affected the production of OO and SO in Mandarin-speaking children (N = 137, age: 4–8 years). The results showed that adult-like production of OO in both reversible and irreversible conditions appeared at the age of six. The adult-like production ability of SO showed a one-year delay in the reversible condition (seven years under the reversible condition versus six years under the irreversible condition). The study suggests that some pragmatic-conceptual representations (such as the action schema) may be precursors of language and serve as a default analysis in language acquisition, while the mapping of the prosody domain onto syntax matures over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| Database: |
Biomedical Index |