Do infants have abstract grammatical knowledge of word order at 17 months? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese
Zhu, Jingtao (ClicAsia)
Franck, Julie (University of Geneva. Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique)
Rizzi, Luigi (University of Geneva. Departament de Linguistique)
Gavarró Algueró, Anna (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Catalana)
Università degli Studi di Siena. Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Cognitivi sul Linguaggio

Date:	2022
Description:	20 pàg.
Abstract:	We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17. 4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.
Grants:	Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad FFI2017-87699-P Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2017-SGR-634
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Eye-tracking ; Word order ; Mandarin Chinese ; Sensitivity to ungrammaticality ; Abstract grammatical knowledge
Published in:	Journal of Child Language, Vol. 49 Núm. 1 (2022) , p. 60-79, ISSN 1469-7602

DOI: 10.1017/S0305000920000756
PMID: 33550998

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