An Experimental Study Of Basic Word Order Acquisition In Mandarin-speaking Children

Two diametrically opposed views have been proposed on the acquisition of word order. On the nativist view, the head parameter is set early (Chomsky 1981; Mazuka 1991; Wexler 1998), with children in the two-word stage already sensitive to how word order is interpreted (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 1996). On the usage-based view, children rely on inductive cognitive abilities to construct their grammar around item-specific patterns and do not develop abstract syntax until a later stage (Tomasello 1992,2000; Akhtar 1998,1999). The nativist scholar would predict rapid acquisition of word order, and a reluctance to adopt non-target word orders at an early age; the usage-based researcher would expect children to be open to the use of non-target word orders.To understand children's acquisition of word order in light of the two divergent views, we carried out an experiment with Mandarin-speaking three-year-olds using novel verbs paired with canonical and non-canonical orders, adopting some features of Akhtar (1999). A total of 83 Mandarin-speaking children were tested, divided into 5 groups, each receiving novel verbs modeled on one of five word orders:SVO, OSV, SOV, VSO and OVS. Two novel verbs denoting dynamic physical action were used. Each child was tested in two sessions, each consisting of 4 parts:(a) animal identification, (b) learning of a novel verb paired with a word order, (c) a video choice task in which children were asked to point to one of two videos when hearing a novel verb used in the experimental word order, (d) an elicited production task in which children were asked to describe an event depicted by a video. Across the two sessions, there were 12 comprehension test items and 12 production test items.Our comprehension results showed that children who received SVO models predominantly used SVO to interpret NVN sentences (94% of the time). This is also true of the children receiving OVS models, who assigned SVO interpretation to NVN sentences 80% of the time. For children who were taught the novel verbs in the two verb-final orders,56% of the responses of OSV group and 61% of the SOV group matched the respective word order models. In terms of children's elicited productions, the SVO group used SVO 98% of the time. The SVO order was also used most of the time by the OVS group (66%), underscoring the significance of the SVO order for the Mandarin-speaking child. Regarding the two verb-final orders,64% of the productions by the SOV group were in SOV order and 21% in OSV order. In contrast, only 25% of the utterances by OSV group were in OSV order, with another 34% in SOV order. These findings suggest that children experience difficulty in differentiating subject from object when facing two preverbal arguments, with a preference to consider the first preverbal argument as subject and the second as object. Children appeared to have little difficulty with VSO order on both comprehension and production tasks.Our findings reflect an accessibility ranking as follows:SVO< SOV/VSO< OSV< OVS. Mandarin-speaking children by three years of age have established SVO solidly as the basic word order, and have also become sensitive to some of the non-canonical (verb-final) word orders, which are also evidenced in naturalistic data (Lee 2009, Song 2009). The fact the children could cope with VSO order may be related to its affinity to SVO order (Baker 2001) and the prevalence of right dislocation structures evidencing VOS order in Mandarin (Lu 1980, Guo 1997). The difficulty with OSV order could be attributed to the absence of intonation cues in the experimental material. Our experimental findings support early syntactic acquisition as predicted by parameter-setting and cast doubt on the usage-based model of acquisition.