儿童语言中的递归领属结构

Recursive possessive constructions in child language

语言的递归性一直是当代语言学界关注的一个重要问题。近年来“递归性是否是人类语言的本质属性”这个问题成为语言学界争论的焦点。有研究者提出儿童对递归结构掌握较晚,在6岁前对递归结构的理解和产出都存在问题。本文通过“基于真值判断的诱发性产出任务”考察了30名4岁的汉语普通话儿童对表领属的递归结构的习得。实验结果显示,4岁的汉语普通话儿童在缺乏足够外界语言输入的情况下,仍能正确理解并产出递归结构。实验结果为“递归性是人类语言的本质属性”这一论点提供了儿童语言的实证支持。

Recursion has always been a hot topic of discussion in linguistics.The claim that recursion is a basic property of human Ianguage has been under serious debate for the past few years.Some prior research on child language showed that children younger than 6 exhibited difficulties in understanding and producing recursive constructions,suggesting that a full comma nd of recursion was only achieved at a relatively late stage of language development.Previous findings seem to pose a challenge to the claim.The present study adopted an innovative experimental method,an elicited production task with a truth value judgment component,to investigate whether or not 4-year-old Mandarin-speaking children have acquired the recursive possessive constmctions in Mandarin.The results showed that the 4-year-olds,even in the absence of sufficient language input,dem on strated correct understanding and production of the Mandarin recursive possessive constructions,therefore providing empirical support for the claim that recursion is a basic property of human language.