Chinese Children's First Language Acquisition Of Principle C

The research on the Binding Theory (BT) occupies a privileged position in linguistic theory. However, the nature and the existence of Principle C in the BT have been debated on extensively in the theoretical literature. In addition, most of the studies concerning Principle C in first language acquisition are conducted with children acquiring English. Given the universal property of Principle C, the effects of Principle C should also be found in other languages, for example, the Chinese language.The present study examines the language phenomenon of Principle C from the perspective of psycholinguistics and discusses the findings in the theoretical framework of Government and Binding Theory of the generative grammar. The purpose of this study is to examine whether Principle C is empirically true with Chinese children's first language acquisition. The main research questions are: (i) Is Chinese children's knowledge of Principle C independent of the factor of directionality? (ii) Is Chinese children's knowledge of Principle C independent of the pragmatics or semantics of the stimulus sentences? (iii) Do Chinese children treat the lexical pronoun and null anaphors differently?The children tested were of 4 to 6 years of age. The testing-task employed is the question-answering task of comprehension. The method of triangulation was employed to verify the content validity of the questionnaire, and the pilot study was conducted to confirm the reliability of the questionnaire. Independent recording of the data by 2 persons was to ascertain results reliability. And the results were analyzed on the SPSS 11.0 software.Experiment 1 addresses the questions of whether Chinese children show the directionality effect and whether Chinese children's knowledge of Principle C is independent of the pragmatics or semantics of the stimulus sentences. The results of Experiment 1 confirm that the children acquiring Chinese are constrained by Principle. Specifically, the findings include: l.The high amount of coreference judgments the children made in this study results from the question-answering task itself; 2. The children were sensitive to the configurational structure of the test sentences; 3. The Chinese children showed no obvious directionality effect, and the backward anaphora was shown to exist in the Chinese language; 4. The semantic or pragmatic factor did modulate children's judgment, but it did not override the grammatical Principle C; 5. The results provide support for the proposal that the directionality effect may be caused by the branching parameter of the language that the children are acquiring.Experiment 2 addresses the question of whether children treat overt pronouns and null anaphors alike under certain domains. The results reveal that the overt pronouns and the null anaphors were dealt with equally. Experiment 2 also confirms the findings in two other studies with children acquiring English that children may interpret all empty categories as pronouns.Further studies are needed in order to test the knowledge of Principle C in children earlier than 4, to employ different tasks based on reflective psychological distinction, and to extend the range of the stimulus sentences, so as to explore the validity and universality of Principle C in a comprehensive way.