Abstract
We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.
Highlights
There is evidence that children show sensitivity to the properties of the language they are exposed to at the earliest observable stage of their syntactic productions
We address the question of comprehension of canonical SVO word order by Mandarin-speaking infants at an earlier period, using eye-tracking measures
Just like Mandarin-speaking adults, 17-month-old infants acquiring Mandarin show a preference for the transitive scene when they encounter well-formed transitive NP-V-NP sequences with novel verbs, but that does not happen when they hear deviant NP-NP-V sequences
Summary
There is evidence that children show sensitivity to the properties of the language they are exposed to at the earliest observable stage of their syntactic productions.
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