Age-related differences in the acceptability of non-canonical word orders in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Prior theoretical and experimental work has demonstrated that the subject-object-verb (SOV) word order is more restricted and more difficult to process than the object-subject-verb (OSV) word order in Chinese. However, few studies have investigated the actual acceptability of non-canonical, verb-final word orders among native speakers. In this study, we conducted a paper-based survey with a group of younger adults and a group of older adults. Non-canonical sentences with and without animacy contrasts were tested with three tasks: acceptability judgement, grammaticality judgement, and subject selection. Our results have two main implications. First, contrary to previous studies, the results suggested that animate-animate-verb (AAV) sentences generally have very poor acceptability, and they may be mostly regarded as uninterpretable. Second, and importantly, we found that while a preference for OSV over SOV was observed in younger adults, it was not evident in older adults. This suggests that the preference for the OSV word order might be modulated by the factor of age.