Hsu Dong-Bo
National Taiwan Normal University - Department of Chinese as a Second Language.
J Child Lang. 2014 Sep;41(5):1115-46. doi: 10.1017/S0305000913000408. Epub 2013 Oct 28.
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.
两项研究调查了三岁说普通话的儿童在使用SVO和SbaOV结构动词时的句法生成能力。在研究1中，用一种结构向儿童教授新动词，并评估他们在另一种结构中的生成情况。儿童在SVO话语中能生成在“把”字句结构中教授的动词，但在“把”字句话语中生成在SVO结构中教授的动词时表现出顺序效应。在研究2中，儿童通过结构启动（即在听到SVO或“把”字句结构中的动词之后）来描述动画场景。儿童表现出结构启动效应，在听到这些结构中的动词后，分别生成了更多的SVO和“把”字句话语。这些结果表明，三岁说普通话的儿童对SVO和SbaOV结构都有生成性知识。他们超越SVO主要输入频率的能力与基于纯粹用法的早期语法习得观点相悖。
