| In the linguistic study of Chinese,comparative structure has not only been an important grammatical item,but has also been one of the important factors which indicates the maturity of the children's language system,which,as a result,has attracted the scholars and linguists from domestic and abroad.Currently,most of the studies on comparative construction are taking a theoretical perspective,aiming to show the developing process of the comparatives with data collected from limited subjects for a long period.In China,however,the studies on the children's sensitivity to the comparative research are insufficient and inadequate.This thesis investigates Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of comparative constructions.Based on the previous acquisition research,the present study mainly aims to explore the Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of comparative structures with different properties(adjective comparative,verbal comparative)and different syntactic structures(short comparative,negative comparative and typical comparative).In this study,the author investigated children's acquisition of comparatives constructions from both the perspective of production and the perspective of comprehension.Thus,there are two experiments in the present study.The first is the sentence-picture matching task,which requires the subject to match the right picture with the sentence he or she has just heard.The second experiment is the syntactic priming production task,which tries to let the subject produce the expected sentence structures in a given picture context.The first Experiment aims to show the children's comprehension of the comparatives with different property and different syntactic structures.The Second Experiment aims to show the features of the children's production in different age period.One hundred and sixty children aged 2:06 to 6:02 were divided into four groups,i.e.2-3,3-4,4-5,5-6,from a kindergarten in Xiangtan and got tested in this study.In addition,a group of 50 adults were also involved in the experiments as controls.The result of the first experiments shows that children's comprehension of short comparative is earlier than that of the typical comparative,and the negative comparative is found to be the most difficult for them.With the children's growth,their performance in this study is more and more Adult-like.As for the different properties of the comparative,there is almost no difference for the children to comprehend between the adjective comparative and verbal comparative.However,there is indeed some difference in comprehension ability between children of different ages.Most of the children under four years old have a better comprehension of the verbal comparative than of the adjective comparative while there is no difference between the children more than four years old.The second experiment shows that children can produce comparative structure at an early age.There are mainly three types of comparative structure in their language system,short comparative,typical comparative and negative comparative.Most of the children could not produce typical comparative even with an input of typical comparative before the age of four.The total number of children's production is half the amount of adults',which will increase with age.Therefore,we are safe to come to the following conclusions,Firstly,even though the children's production of comparative structure falls behind the adults,they can indeed master the comparative structure as evidenced in the first experiment and the second experiment.Secondly,3 to 4 and 4 to 5 are two critical period for the children's development of the comparative construction.Thirdly,children's ability of cognition develops earlier than their use of linguistic knowledge,which may explain why children could not produce typical comparative at an early age,while comprehending them in the two experiments. |
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