Investigation And Research On Acquisition Of Relative Clauses Of Mandarin-speaking Children

The study of linguistic theory aims to describe the internal rules of language system in human brains and the study of child language acquisition is an important method for understanding the similarities and differences of language. The main task of the study of child language acquisition is to know the language system in child's brain.The acquisition of relative clauses has been a hot subject in numerous investigations over the past thirty years. The majority of these investigations are concerned with children's comprehension of relative clauses in English. Many hypotheses and processing strategies have been proposed concerning it. However, there are few researches concerning the acquisition of relative clauses in Chinese and those hypotheses and processing strategies may not apply to Chinese relative clauses. For the Chinese relative clause which precedes the head noun and marked by the morpheme de has different typological characteristics from SVO languages such as English or French and SOV languages such as Japanese or Korean. Therefore, the investigations on how Mandarin-speaking children acquire relative clauses will contribute to the understanding of relative clause acquisition.This paper presents two cross-sectional studies of Mandarin-speaking children's production of relative clauses including subject relative clause, object relative clause, adjunct relative clause and so on. The present study is of a great originality as there are few previous studies adopting similar method. There are two issues to be addressed in this thesis. One is the accessibility hierarchy about acquisition of relative clause, and the other is children's acquisition tendency of certain types of relative clauses. A number of theoretically valuable facts concerning acquisition are obtained. For example, the acquisition of object relative clause precedes the acquisition of other types of relative clause and children acquire object relative clause as early as 4 years old.