| A central problem in the study of language development is how children acquire the abstract linguistic structures of their native language such that they can formulate novel utterances. The present dissertation examined this developmental process with specific focus on factors of language typology and children's linguistic experience. Study one investigated the developmental progression of Mandarin-speaking children's productivity with verb constructions by adopting a novel verb experimental method. Studies two and three, by bridging experimental and naturalistic designs, examined how individual variations in Mandarin-speaking children's productivity exhibited in the experimental setting were related to the language they experienced in naturalistic contexts.;Forty-eight Mandarin-speaking children from three age groups (mean ages 2;8, 3;6 and 4;4) participated in an elicited production task. Contrasting results were obtained. In a first set of analyses examining whether children could produce a novel construction that had not been modeled in training, Mandarin-speaking children demonstrated a later onset of productivity than what has been reported for children acquiring English. However, a second set of analyses, which examined a wider set of construction types, revealed that Mandarin-speaking children's capacity for generalization of verb constructions increased dramatically.;Studies two and three focused on a subset of twelve children from the original experimental study. Focusing on twelve children ranging between 2;8 and 3;6, these two studies analyzed natural speech data of the twelve children and their mothers. Study two compared children's concurrent experimental and natural verb use, and study three examined what are referred to as variation set structures---that is, naturally occurring clusters of partial repetitions in maternal child-directed speech. An overarching finding across these two studies is that the diversity of linguistic experience (e.g., using familiar verbs in a wide array of argument frames, hearing a variety of verbs repeated in variation set structures) was positively related to children's ability to generalize novel verbs.;Findings revealed both crosslinguistic differences from prior studies of verb constructions, as well as individual variations in verb construction acquisition. It is argued that these findings support the usage-based account to language acquisition which stresses the essential role of language environment and language use in the acquisition of abstract linguistic structure. |
