Children's Adaption to Input Change Using an Abstract Syntactic Representation: Evidence From Structural Priming in Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers.

Dong-Bo Hsu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02186

Abstract

Two studies were undertaken to investigate structural priming in Mandarin-speaking three-, four- and, six-year-old children using a Mandarin-specific alternation between an SVO construction and a ba-construction (SbaOV). Structural priming occurred either as a single prime or cumulatively when a block of multiple primes with the same structure is administered. The results of Study 1 find that these preschoolers exhibited structural priming effects of similar magnitudes with the SVO-ba alternation across three age groups. The results of Study 2 show that they exhibited cumulative structural priming effects of similar magnitudes when there is no delay vs. a 1-day delay between their comprehension of primes and their target descriptions. The results also indicate that the participants exhibited stronger cumulative structural priming than regular structural priming. Together, these results suggest that at the age of three, children can employ an abstract syntactic representation to adapt to input changes and this adaptation operates on an implicit learning mechanism.

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 23 November 2018 Accepted: 10 September 2019Published: 01 October 2019Citation: Hsu D-B (2019) Children’s Adaption to Input Change Using an Abstract Syntactic Representation: Evidence From Structural Priming in Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers.Front
To investigate whether (1) young Mandarin-speaking children (3, 4, and 6-year-olds) can exhibit structural priming and (2) whether this effect may vary across age groups, various logit mixed effect models were fitted to the data (Jaeger, 2008)
To determine whether the children’s demonstration of structural priming and cumulative structural priming differed in magnitude across age groups, we ran a mixed logit model that included the following variables as fixed effects: (a) Age (3 vs. 4 vs. 6); (b) Prime Syntax (SVO vs. BA); (c) Prime Type; and (d) Bilingualism

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 23 November 2018 Accepted: 10 September 2019Published: 01 October 2019Front. One of the essential issues in language acquisition is how children employ acquired abstract syntactic representations to produce language and how these abstract representations interact with exposure to input. The present study employs structural priming, which has commonly been considered a promising tool to investigate these issues (Branigan and Pickering, 2017), using the Mandarin-specific SVO-ba alternation illustrated in examples (1) and (2), with the aim to address the issues of how young children draw on an acquired syntactic representation to accommodate input statistics across different age groups and explore a relatively lesser studied language population with regard to structural priming in children’s language. SVO structure hippo blow-fly-CPL little-cat (2) Hema ba xiao-mao chuei-fei-le. Ba construction hippo BA little-cat blow-fly-CPL (SOV) ‘A hippo blew away a little cat.’ SVO structure hippo blow-fly-CPL little-cat (2) Hema ba xiao-mao chuei-fei-le. ba construction hippo BA little-cat blow-fly-CPL (SOV) ‘A hippo blew away a little cat.’

Methods

Results

Conclusion