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The acquisition of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech in Mandarin Chinese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2014

JIDONG CHEN  and
YASUHIRO SHIRAI
JIDONG CHEN*
Affiliation:
California State University at Fresno, USA
YASUHIRO SHIRAI
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Jidong Chen, California State University – Linguistics, 5245 N Backer Ave, PB92, Fresno, California 93740, United States. e-mail: jchen@csufresno.edu
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Abstract

This study investigates the developmental trajectory of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin-learning children's speech. We analyze the spontaneous production of RCs by four monolingual Mandarin-learning children (0;11 to 3;5) and their input from a longitudinal naturalistic speech corpus (Min, 1994). The results reveal that in terms of the syntactic role of the head noun in the matrix clause, isolated noun phrase RCs dominate, followed by those that modify the subject or object of the matrix clauses and predicate nominal relatives. This pattern differs from those observed in English (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000), German (Brandt, Diessel & Tomasello, 2008), and Japanese (Ozeki & Shirai, 2007). Regarding the syntactic role of the head noun inside the RC (i.e. subject, object, or oblique relatives), the early RCs are dominated by object relatives. This pattern also differs from those observed in English and Japanese. We propose a multifactorial usage-based learning account for the developmental patterns.

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Articles
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Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , March 2015 , pp. 394 - 422
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a Provost's award for research release time from California State University at Fresno. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 35th Boston University Conference on Language Development, the 1st International Symposium on Chinese Language and Discourse, the 22nd Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science, and the 18th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics in 2010. We thank Xinchun Wang for coding part of the data for inter-coder reliability, and Amanda Brown and Hiromi Ozeki for helpful comments on the draft. We also thank Dylan Glynn for consultation on the statistics. Anonymous JCL reviewers and editors offered helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper. All of these contributions are acknowledged with grateful thanks. Any remaining errors are the authors'.

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