An Exploration Into The Acquisition Of Adjective Recursion Among Mandarin-speaking Children

In recent years,recursion has been a hot topic in terms of the study on the nature of human language and the process of first language acquisition,especially the children's first language acquisition.To explore Chinese children's acquisition of adjective recursion,88 children and20 adults who are all normal Chinese native speakers are recruited in this study.Thereamong,88 normal Mandarin-speaking children aged three to six from kindergartens are treated as the experimental group and 20 adults aged 22-29 are treated as the control group,and both groups are tested in two designed experiments:the “Picture-comprehension” test and the “Picture-elicited-production” test(each test consists of 11 items,of which the first 2 are pretest items,and the latter 9 covering three 1-level,2-level,3-level adjective recursive constructions are formal test items).After the analysis of data collected with the aid of SPSS 16.0,we get the following findings: First,the age is a direct influencing factor concerning both the comprehensive and productive ability of adjective recursion among children,and the children of higher ages tend to score higher in the tests.Second,gender is not an influencing factor in the acquisition of adjective recursion,noticing that children of different genders in the same age group have equivalent performance in the two tests.Third,there exists a sequence of children's acquisition of different levels of adjective recursion.With regard to the comprehension of adjective recursion,children of three years old have gained the comprehensive ability of 1-level adjective recursion,and those above four can comprehend both 2-level and 3-level adjective recursion.As to the production of adjective recursion,children aged three can produce 1-level adjective recursion,whereas not until they are five years old can they produce 2-level adjective recursion,and the children above five have the productive ability of 3-level adjective recursion.The findings of this study support Chomsky's Innateness Theory,which argues that language acquisition among children rests in the inborn language device in mind,instead of the exterior language environment.