A Study On Children’s Acquisition Of Chinese NPs In Recursive Possessive And Coordination Constructions

Recursion is claimed to be an important step in the evolution of human language and a crucial ability that allows the generative power of language(Fitch,Hauser,and Chomsky,2005;Hauser et al.,2002;Martins and Fitch,2014).To explore children’s acquisition path of Chinese NPs in recursive possessive and coordination constructions,the present study tests 180 children aged 3 to 8(30 in each age group)and 30 adults(as a control group)with the employment of two designed experiments: “Picture-Comprehension” test and “Picture-Elicited-Production” test.Each test includes six items(three in each construction).The first,second and third level embedding are all involved in this study.All the subjects are native speakers of Chinese.The data show that children’s ages significantly influence their comprehensive and productive ability on acquiring recursive possessives and coordination.What’s more,children’s comprehensive and productive ability of coordination are acquired at the same time.While their productive ability of recursive possessives is acquired later than comprehensive ability.The results also reveal that children have more difficulties in acquiring recursive possessive than coordination.Four-year-old children are able to comprehend and produce second level and third level coordination simultaneously.However,recursive structure with a single possessive and the one with two possessives are acquired by children one after another,and then the structure with more than two possessives.Children cannot possess adult-like productive ability on third level recursive possessives until seven.The further analysis indicates that young children tend to give a conjunctive interpretation,delete one or more possessive or leave out the genitive marker “de” when they deal with recursive sentences with more than one possessive.In addition,the findings provide supportive facts for Chomsky’s Innateness Theory,which claims that children’s language acquisition depends on the natural language device in mind instead of the language environment.