Chinese Children’s Acquisition Of The Ba Construction

Ba construction has been a hot topic in Chinese linguistics. Nevertheless, there isonly limited literature on the acquisition of Ba construction by mandarin-acquiringchildren. Furthermore, the previous acquisition studies on Ba construction are almostexclusively descriptive, aiming at reporting the development of this constructionthrough longitudinal data. In contrast, children’s sensitivity to the specific features ofBa construction is less known.This thesis addresses the acquisition of a subtype of Ba construction by mandarinchildren, namely, Ba construction with a locative prepositional phrases complement,which has the surface form of “NP1+Ba+NP2+VP+PPLocative”. Both children’sproduction and comprehension of the target structure were investigated. The researchconsists of three experiments. Experiment One is an elicited production task, in whichsubjects were prompted to produce the target structure in given contexts. ExperimentTwo is a video verification task. Subjects were required to judge the truth of test itemsagainst the contexts provided by video clips. Experiment Three is an act-out task, inwhich subjects were asked to act out the event described by the target structurepresented with the form of audio stimuli. The first experiment aims to investigatechildren’s production, whereas the latter two experiments address theircomprehension of the target structure. One hundred and fifty three Children of threeage groups, i.e.,5-6,4-5and3-4recruited from three kindergartens in Xiangtan weretested. A control group of adults were also included in the experiments as controls.The results of Experiment One show that children produced half as many Baconstructions as adults did, and the production rate increases along with the age.Experiment Two shows that although children’s judgment of well-formed test itemswas not significantly different from that of adults, they tend to give more affirmativejudgments to ill-formed items compared to adults. With the increase of age, thesubjects’ judgment becomes more adult-like. Experiment Three reveals that children’sperformance in acting out the test stimuli is very much adult-like, which suggests children and adults have identical linguistic knowledge with respect to the Baconstruction under discussion. On the basis of the above results, we conclude that,though children’s performance in production of the Ba construction is far from beingadult-like, they do possess the relative linguistic knowledge of the Ba construction, asevidenced by their almost perfect performance in the comprehension tests. The lowrate of production observed in child subjects may be because the cognitive load inprocessing the Ba construction hindered them to use the target structure.