A Study On The Acquisition Of The Zai Construction In Child Mandarin

The acquisition of Zai construction is not only a hot topic in the study of Chinese linguistics sentence,but also is the window of the early children's sentence development.But most linguists study the Zai construction in the pure theoretical part for the time being,in other words,many linguists focus on the study of sentence structure and the descriptive of syntax in Zai construction.In contrast,the acquisition of Zai construction in mandarin-speaking children is relatively rare and insufficient at present.This thesis studies the acquisition of two special sentence patterns of Zai construction by mandarin children,which have the surface form of:“Preverbal zai+PPs” and “Postverbal zai + PPs”.In this paper,it will investigate the acquisition of children's production and comprehension of the Zai construction.The present study comprised two sets of experiments.The first Experiment is picture test,which make the tested children produce the target structure according to the given pictures.The second Experiment are one picture and a video verification task,which let the tested children firstly watch one picture and a video,and secondly they were asked to judge the truth of one picture and test items against the contexts given by a picture and a video.The Experiment one intends to test the children's production of the target Zai construction,and the Experiment two intends to investigate children's comprehension of the target Zai construction.In the experiments,one hundred and twenty four Children who were recruited from the kindergartens in Xiangtan of four age groups,i.e.,5-6,4-5,3-4 and 2-3.At the same time,50 adults were also tested in this experiment.Results of experiment one show that: 1.Children can firstly produce Zai sentence when they are two years old,as well as produce some easily Zai constructions;2.Children can produce as half the target Zai constructions as adults did,and with the increase of age,their production of the target Zai constructions will also increase.Experiment two presents that children can produce the target Zai construction,and their performance is more Adult-like.Compared with the adults,they have the same ability to judge the well-formed test items,whereas the ill-formed test items,children are intend to judge the well-formed test items.Therefore,children and adults have the same language ability in these two special sentence patterns.In a word,we conclude that: 1.Children can firstly produce Zai sentence when they are two years old,which absolutely matches the previous experimental results;2.Though children's production of the Zai construction is far away from the adults,children basically have the linguistic language ability as evidenced by the Experiment one and Experiment two.And in the comprehension test items,with the increase of age,chidren's performance is more like adults.3.The low rate of production presented in the Experiment one maybe because of the cognitive stress,therefore,children are hard to judge the target constructions.