On Early Development Of English And Chinese-speaking Children's Verb-Complement Constructions

In the present paper, investigation method, longitudinal observation method, and statistical method are employed to inquire into the similarities and differences of the early development of English and Chinese-speaking children's verb-complement constructions (abbreviated as VCCs). By analyzing the data of two Chinese-speaking children ZHZ & MHR, and an English-speaking child Eve, the paper mainly studies from three aspects: semantic types, syntactic development, and developmental fashion.The result indicates that the two Chinese-speaking children and the English-speaking child show great similarities in early development of VCCs, which are shown in the following three aspects.Firstly, direction complements, result complements and degree complements are found in three subjects'data. The explanation could be that the emerging order and use frequencies of the semantic types are mainly affected by semantic cognition difficulties, cognitive development of the children and the features of the linguistic structures.Secondly, the syntactic development of VCCs is influenced by structural complexity and linguistic input.Thirdly, the Chinese-speaking children and the English-speaking child show similarity in developmental fashion of VCCs. That is, they all adopt the symbolic operations such as substitution, expansion, addition and coordination.Nevertheless, because of the differences in the linguistic structures, the differences also exist in the early development of VCCs.Much more VCC instances with objects are reported in the Eve's data than in the ZHZ and MHR's data. The first reason could be that Chinese is a pro-drop language allowing null arguments while English is not a pro-drop language, and the arguments must be overtly realized except in specific contexts. And another reason is that ZHZ and MHR tend to use the patient-as-subject sentences and the sentences of the BA pattern.In addition, the findings are obtained through the error analysis that Chinese-speaking children make few errors while the English-speaking child uses the prepositions and verb inflections such as tense ungrammatically in many VCC instances, which is a common phenomenon in the early syntactic development of the English-speaking children. The reason could be that the optional usage of prepositions and the morphological transparency in Chinese posit less complexity for the Chinese-speaking children in acquiring language. Thus the English-speaking children's language acquisition is considered to be more difficult.The conclusion of the present study is that the English-speaking child and the Chinese-speaking children share great similarities in the early development of VCCs; there also exist differences because of the differences between the two languages; and children's early development of VCCs could be affected by the factors such as cognitive development, structural complexity, linguistic input, structural features of the languages, and etc.