The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HKSAR, China.
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HKSAR, China; The Hong Kong Polytechnic University - Peking University Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics, HKSAR, China; Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, HKSAR, China.
Cognition. 2020 Mar;196:104103. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104103. Epub 2019 Nov 18.
A core question in language acquisition is whether children's syntactic processing is experience-dependent and language-specific, or whether it is governed by abstract, universal syntactic machinery. We address this question by presenting corpus and on-line processing dat a from children learning Mandarin Chinese, a language that has been important in debates about the universality of parsing processes. The corpus data revealed that two different relative clause constructions in Mandarin are differentially used to modify syntactic subjects and objects. In the experiment, 4-year-old children's eye-movements were recorded as they listened to the two RC construction types (e.g., Can you pick up the pig that pushed the sheep?). A permutation analysis showed that children's ease of comprehension was closely aligned with the distributional frequencies, suggesting syntactic processing preferences are shaped by the input experience of these constructions.
语言习得的一个核心问题是儿童的句法处理是依赖经验和语言特定的，还是受抽象的、普遍的句法机制支配的。我们通过呈现来自学习汉语普通话的儿童的语料库和在线处理数据来解决这个问题，汉语普通话在关于解析过程普遍性的争论中一直很重要。语料库数据显示，汉语中的两种不同的关系从句结构在修饰句法主语和宾语时的使用方式不同。在实验中，我们记录了 4 岁儿童在听两种 RC 结构类型（例如，你能捡起推羊的猪吗？）时的眼动。置换分析表明，儿童的理解容易度与分布频率密切相关，这表明句法处理偏好是由这些结构的输入经验塑造的。
