Children''s Early Use of Degree Adverbs in Mandarin BI Comparative Structure
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Lai, Mei-Hsuan
Abstract
This study investigates whether children’s early use of degree adverbs in Mandarin BI comparative structure is rule-based or analogy-based. Following the rule-based account, it is hypothesized that the basic BI comparative structure and a broad-range rule that allows for degree adverbs in BI comparative structure are constructed first. Children will follow the rule and place adverbs in the BI structure “Y [bǐ X] +___+predicate“. On the other hand, the analogy-based account hypothesizes that children rely on a formula “Y bǐ [X___]”, in which they analogically fill in the blank with a simple sentence “X+ adverb +predicate”. Evidence was collected from three aspects, including naturalistic data analyses, experimental elicitation of BI utterances, and grammatical judgment task. Analyses of early spontaneous language data revealed that the children before age 4 did not seem to have mastered the BI comparative structure due to few exemplars, let alone adverb use. It echoes the results of grammatical judgment task where the children did not distinguish between correct and incorrect uses of degree adverbs in the tested BI sentences. The elicitation task elicited BI utterances from the children of age 3 and 5 that received different conditioned input. One group was exposed to the input of a predicate modified by an adverb that was not allowed in BI comparative structure. The other group was exposed to the input of nominalized predicate for contrast. The incorrect BI utterances elicited from the three-year-old children revealed that the young children created a formula for BI comparative structure, “Y bǐ [X___]”, where they slotted in the frame with a predicate modified by an incompatible adverb, or an incompatible nominalized predicate. Namely, they underwent the same process of analogy making.
Subjects
Mandarin BI comparative structure
degree adverbs
rule-based
analogy-based
language acquisition
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-97-R94142002-1.pdf
Size
23.53 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):782c598b82908b31fa562056db111993