An Exploration Into Mentally-Retarded Mandarin-Speaking Children's Language Recursion

Language recursion has been recognized by some scholars since ancient times.However,it has begun to draw people's attention since the publication of the famous article by Hauser,Chomsky and Fitch(2002)“The Faculty of Language: What Is It,Who Has It,and How Did It Evolve?”.This pushed the concept to a higher position and therefore,both foreign and domestic scholars started to discuss and explore it.The research employs some items to test a group of mentally-retarded Mandarin-speaking children between 10 and 16 years old in order to find out if these nine children have the ability to understand and produce recursive structures,how the ability is and whether the ability can be improved or not after some training.Compared with the previous studies,the present study is original in three aspects.The former studies focus mainly on the recursion about adults,normal people and languages such as English,Germany,and Japanese,but the present study pays attention to the mentally-retarded Mandarin-speaking children's comprehensive and productive ability for recursive structures.The items are classified into two kinds.One kind is picture-comprehension items and the other is picture-production items.These two kinds of materials are used to test and train their ability to understand and produce recursive structures respectively.It is discernible from the test and comparison that normal children are as capable as adults in terms of the comprehensive and productive ability for recursive structures,but most of the mentally-retarded children have a far lower ability than the former ones,especially when it comes to the productive ability.In addition,they are all not able to produce nested recursive structures of two degrees correctly.However,their comprehensive and productive ability for recursive structures can be improved after some linguistic training and they can finally acquire the ability which they lacked before,though the time spent on their training is different.It is the most time-consuming for them to acquire the productive ability for nested recursive structure of two degrees.From the new and unique perspective,the research takes the mentally-retarded children as research subjects,and the findings are supportive of Chomskian Recursion-Only Hypothesis(ROH)and also alert us to the very fact that the mentally-retarded children's comprehensive and productive ability for recursive structures can be increased.Through some targeted linguistic training,their ability to comprehend and produce recursive structures can be as high as that of the normal children.Therefore,it also shows that it is effective and meaningful for the whole society,especially for the parents of the mentally-retarded children and the teachers working in the special education field,to spend some time improving their comprehensive and productive ability for recursive structures.