Tsung Linda, Gong Yang Frank
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney, Darlington, NSW, Australia.
Faulty of Education, University of Macau, Taipa, China.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jan 15;11:607818. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.607818. eCollection 2020.
This article reports on an inquiry that investigated the development of ba constructions in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of ba construction were extracted from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus collected from 168 preschoolers aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6 (year; month; Li and Tse, 2011). Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus, University of Hong Kong. Data analysis indicated that: (1) Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 11 types of ba construction, and the children in the youngest age group (age 2;6) were able to produce six types of them; (2) children at 4 years old (age 4;6) experienced a critical developmental period of pragmatic use, and at 5 years old (age 5;6) they had attained cognitive and linguistic maturity in understanding the semantic and syntactic features of ba constructions; and (3) there was a significant age effect on the production of three types of ba construction, but no significant association between the children's gender and their production of ba constructions. These findings offer fresh insights into understanding Chinese children's innate capacity to understand the co-occurrence constraints concerning the syntactic, semantic and verb features inherent in ba construction, and their developmental ability to denote telic events by resorting to the appropriate ba sentence patterns.
本文报道了一项关于幼儿期汉语“把”字句发展情况的调查。所有“把”字句的例句均从香港大学的《幼儿汉语语料库》中提取，该语料库收集了168名年龄分别为2;6、3;6、4;6和5;6（岁;月）的学龄前儿童的语言数据（李和谢，2011）。数据分析表明：（1）说汉语的儿童能产出11种类型的“把”字句，最年幼组（2;6岁）的儿童能够产出其中六种；（2）4岁（4;6岁）的儿童经历了“把”字句语用使用的关键发展期，5岁（5;6岁）时他们在理解“把”字句的语义和句法特征方面已达到认知和语言成熟；（3）在三种类型“把”字句的产出上存在显著的年龄效应，但儿童的性别与他们对“把”字句的产出之间没有显著关联。这些研究结果为理解中国儿童理解“把”字句中固有的句法、语义和动词特征共现限制的先天能力，以及他们通过采用合适的“把”字句句式来表示有终点事件的发展能力提供了新的见解。
