The First Language Acquisition Of Topic Structures In Mandarin Chinese

‘Topic structure in Mandarin consists of two parts: the topic,which invariably occurs first,and the comment,a clause that follows the topic and says something about it’(Xu and Langendoen 1985:1).There are two semantic characteristics of topics: ‘first,topics must be either definite or generic;second,topics set a framework in naming what the sentence is about’(Li and Thompson 1981:86).This study investigates the acquisition of topic structures in L1 Mandarin.Specifically,two research questions are addressed: 1)When do Mandarin-speaking children acquire the definiteness constraint of topic structure? 2)When are Mandarin-speaking children sensitive to the‘‘aboutness’ ’ relation between topic and comment in object topicalization?A total of sixty children aged between 3 and 7 years were tested on their knowledge of topic structure in Mandarin Chinese.In experiment 1,an elicited imitation task was employed to test children’s awareness of the definiteness constraint on topics in the topicalization structure.“Chinese style” topic structure,which has similar semantic features,was also tested as control sentence.Three types of nominals,namely zhe(this)-CL-NP,yi(one)-CL-NP,and bare noun,were used as topics.The results show that 3-year-olds are not fully aware of the definiteness constraint of topics,as they tend to allow yi-CL-NP to occur in the topic position.The reasons may lie in that the mappings between nominals and their syntactic position are acquired later by Chinese children.The complexity of yi-CL-NP in Mandarin Chinese and the intervention of pragmatic factors may also cause difficulty to children’s comprehension of the definiteness constraint.Moreover,the special characteristic of the “Chinese style” topic structure in which the topic sets a semantic domain for the subject of the comment may pose a challenge.Both adults and children in our experiment may treat the topic as an adverbial clause,so they don’t concern more about the(in)definiteness of nominals.Previous studies already find children from 4 to6 years old tend to produce adverbial clause topic structure in their spontaneous speech.In experiment 2,a picture verification task was adopted to examine children’s sensitivity to the “aboutness” relation between topic and comment in object topicalization.Two types of contexts,i.e.,the modifier NP topic context and the bare noun topic context,were employed in the experiment.The results reveal that children as early as 3 years old are sensitive to the “aboutness” relations between topic and comment in object topicalization and reach adult-like performance,consistent with the findings of previous studies.When it comes to the comparison between modifier NP and bare noun topics,3-year-olds did not differentiate modifier NP and bare noun,but children after 4 years old were sensitive to the difference.This may be because young children have overextension problem in vocabulary acquisition,and their knowledge of the specificity of modifier NP and bare noun are not mature.Overall,the present study indicates children haven’t fully acquired the definiteness constraint on topic before 7 years of age,but their knowledge of the “aboutness”relation between topic and comment have been adult-like as early as 3 years of age.The mappings between nominal structure and their syntactic position,which involves interface knowledge,are difficult for young Mandarin-speaking children to acquire.