Acquiring Double Object Verbs in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate Chinese children's acquisition of double object verbs with gei. These verbs were classified into three types, gei-required, gei-forbidden, and gei-optional. The following issues were examined, i.e. the difficulty levels, unmarked/marked patterns, and development of untargeted patterns. Two tasks were employed, a grammaticality task and a sentence elicitation task. Forty-five children aged from three to five and fifteen adults participated in the experiment, who were further divided into four groups. i.e. Group 1 (three-year-olds), Group 2 (four-year-olds), Group 3 (five-year-olds), and Group 4 (native controls). The results are as follows: First, among the three types, gei-forbidden verbs posed the most difficulty for the children, while the other two were relatively easier. Second, with regard to gei-required verbs, [V-DO-gei-IO] was the unmarked pattern while [V-gei-IO-DO] was marked. Similarly, for gei-optional verbs, the most unmarked pattern was [V-DO-gei-IO], followed by [V-IO-DO], and [V-gei-IO-DO] the most marked. Third, a steady development was found in the children's untargeted sentences. The children began with mono-transitive use of these verbs, then added a second object, and finally generated more complex sentences.