普通话儿童递归性关系从句习得研究

A Study of Mandarin Children’s Acquisition of Recursive Relative Clauses

Hauser, Chomsky和Fitch于2002年在Science上发文强调,递归是人类自然语言所共有的狭义句法,为人类所独有。从此,一语习得领域涌现出各种递归结构习得理论和实验研究,但很少涉及递归性从句。本文旨在进行递归性关系从句习得理论和实验研究。先构建了递归界定理论体系,将递归分成尾递归、内递归和混合递归,然后招募249名4-9岁普通话儿童和46名成人,对三类递归性关系从句进行“看图-诱导对比产出”实验,得出如下结论:不同类型递归序列的习得时间明显不同,儿童7岁习得二级尾递归序列,9岁习得二级混合递归序列,至少10岁才习得二级内递归序列。本文和一些神经语言学文献的实验结果相互印证。本文还发现,生命性等语义因素会显著影响二级递归序列的习得时间。

Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch published a paper in Science in 2002, emphasizing that the faculty of language in the narrow sense is recursive and this trait is exclusive to humans.Since then there has been a lot of theoretical and experimental research on children’s acquisition of recursive structures, but little on recursive clauses(RCs).This paper aims at a theoretical and experimental study of children’s acquisition of RCs, first constructing a definition system of recursion, dividing recursion into tail, nested and mixed recursion, and then recruiting 249 mandarin-speaking children aged 4-9 and 46 adults to conduct a “picture-elicited-minimal-pair production” experiment.The main findings are as follows: children acquire 2-level tail-recursion RCs at 7, 2-level mixed-recursion RCs at 9, and 2-level nested-recursion RCs at least at 10, showing that different types of recursive sequences are acquired at significantly different ages.The results in this study and some neurolinguistic findings in the literature are in mutual corroboration.The paper also finds that semantic factors like animacy can significantly influence the acquisition of 2-level recursive sequences.