The Concepts of Topic and Subject in First Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

CHIEN, YU-CHIN, and LUST, BARBARA. The Concepts of Topic and Subject in First Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 1359-1375. Much current first language acquisition research is centered on defining the nature of children's concepts in early child language. It has been argued that not only can the concept of topic provide a basic principle for general sentence organization, but that topic may underlie the development of the grammatical concept of subject. In this study, we provide evidence that young children acquiring Mandarin Chinese differentiate the concept of subject from the concept of topic, even though Chinese is a topic-prominent language. Data are based on results of a standardized elicited imitation test of 95 Chinese children in Taiwan (2-6 to 5-0) on a set of coordinate constructions and a set of Equi-type constructions. The results of this study are discussed in terms of the implication that even for highly topic-oriented languages like Chinese, it is necessary to attribute to young children some sensitivity to formal grammatical concepts as well as semantic or pragmatic ones in first language acquisition.