Manifestation Of Recursion In Acquisition Of Relatives Of Mandarin-speaking Children

As a typical representation of relativization in language, recursion has been considered the central and unique feature of the faculty of language (Hauser et al.2002). It becomes a landmark for child language acquisition and an essential research field in many languages. For forty years, children’s acquisition of relative clauses have been widely studied in academia, especially in English, French, Italian and some other languages. The majority of their studies are concerned about:1) At what age children acquire the relative clauses;2) The difficulty hierarchy of relative clause types. In the meanwhile, many hypotheses are proposed to explain children’s acquisition and processing traits of relative clauses.Nevertheless, there lack of systematic researches of relative clauses from the perspective of language acquisition of Mandarin-speaking children, let alone children with Delayed Language Development (DLD). In view of current situation, this paper firstly tests both children’s and adults’ comprehension of Chinese relative clauses through DREAM (Diagnostic Receptive-Expressive Assessment of Mandarin Chinese) to discover children’s comprehension characteristics. Secondly,32children with DLD are screened out through DREAM for further comparative studies, aiming to find out TD (Typically Developing) children’s and DLD children’s comprehension traits respectively, which are explained through main hypotheses that are concerned with the acquisition and processing of relative clauses.