A Study On The Production Of Possessive Recursion And Self-embedding Recursion By Mandarin School-age Children With Mental Retardation

As two typical representations of the tail recursion and inner-recursion within the theoretical framework of Chomsky Hierarchy,the possessive recursion and self-embedding recursion have become significant signs of children language acquisition.The study on the acquisition of possessive and self-embedding recursion can not only enrich the theoretical debate as well as the empirical studies,but also provide possible instructive guidance for the recovery treatment programs for children with language disorder.The present study thus aims to firstly compare the performance in the acquisition of two kinds of recursion between adults and typically-developing(TD)children so as to discover their characteristics in acquisition of recursion.Secondly it intends to make a comparison between TD children and Mentally-retarded(MR)children in order to find out the similarities and differences between TD children and MR children and attempts to account for them with related hypothesis and theories.The followings are conclusions.For similarities,(1)MR children share the same asymmetry with TD children between 1-layer and 2-layer recursion;(2)both groups of children experience the asymmetry between possessive recursion and self-embedding recursion;(3)for both TD children and MR children,age exerts an important influence on their acquisition of recursive structures.(4)most frequently occurred mistakes for both MR children and TD children include Type 2(simplifying recursive structures by omitting function word “de”,heads,coordination and declarative treatment)and Type 3(uttering complex structures with no order)whereas TD children don't made the Type 1 mistakes(uttering broken words);(4)MR children and TD children made approximately the same number of Type 3 errors,that is,uttering rather complex constructions lacking order.For differences,(1)when compared with TD children,MR children are significantly delayed in producing both possessive recursion and self-embedding recursion;(2)while for MR children,the acquisition of possessive recursion is in an obviously direct correlation with that of self-embedding recursion,the correlation between these two types of recursion is not very significant for TD children;(3)among three main mistakes occurred in both groups of children,broken words constitute an unique type of errors occurred among MR children.