Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese

Jidong Chen,Shu Yang,Angel Chan,Bhuvana Narasimhan,Wenchun Yang

doi:10.3390/languages5020014

Abstract

The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.

Highlights

Children acquire the core components of a language based on experience with the ambient language by the age of four or five years (e.g., Hoff 2009).their knowledge of information structure (IS)—adapting the production of language to the appropriate informational needs of the interlocutors and specific speech contexts—tends to lag behind (e.g., Höhle et al 2016)
Against the theoretical and empirical background described above, our study explores the nature of age effects on the linguistic encoding of IS, namely, word ordering preferences, by asking: how do monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and adults order “old” and “new” referents in conjunct NPs? Conjunct NPs were chosen, as they are simple to produce and allow for information status to be manipulated in noun phrases that do not otherwise differ in topicality or semantic or grammatical role
The adults showed an overall preference for the “old-before-new” word order: 82.33% “old-before-new” responses in contrast to 17.67% “new-before-old”

Summary

Introduction

Children acquire the core components of a language (e.g., phonology, morphology, and syntax) based on experience with the ambient language by the age of four or five years (e.g., Hoff 2009) Their knowledge of information structure (IS)—adapting the production of language to the appropriate informational needs of the interlocutors and specific speech contexts—tends to lag behind (e.g., Höhle et al 2016). Bock et al (2004) suggest that speakers’ choice of ordering information that is old versus new in discourse is influenced by conceptual prominence, i.e., which information is activated and accessible at the time of speaking in discourse They reason that, paradoxically, conceptual prominence could be associated with new information that involves novelty and change, leading it to be mentioned first.

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Discussion

Conclusion