Control in Mandarin-speaking children's early naturalistic production

Abstract

The present research uses longitudinal production data from four monolingual Mandarin-speaking children under age 2 to investigate the acquisition of complement control in Mandarin Chinese. The main purpose of the research is to explore whether control is available to Mandarin children in early language development and to capture the emergence of control structures in child Mandarin. Our analysis of the data obtained in 145 weekly or biweekly audio- and video-taped sessions demonstrate that children produce control sentences as early as before 2. They have produced control sentences with a variety of control verbs. A scrutiny of the way in which these control sentences are used and what children do and do not do in some contexts reveals that properties of control in adult grammar also surface in early control sentences. Children's early control sentences respect structural constraints such as the generalized control rule and the overtness requirement on object control. They never omit matrix objects in object control structures. Early control sentences also suggest differences from two superficially similar structures, i.e. the serial verb construction and coordination, in various aspects. Young children's control sentences exhibit universal as well as language-specific properties of development. We take such findings as cross-linguistic evidence for early child control and for the continuity view of language acquisition.