An Exploration Into Chinese Children’s Acquisition Of Recursion

Recursion is claimed to be an important step in the evolution of human language and an important ability which allows the generative power of language(Fitch, Hauser,and Chomsky, 2005; Hauser et al., 2002; Martins and Fitch, 2014).To explore Chinese children’s acquisition of recursion, the present study tests 145 children aged 3-10 with the employment of two designed experiments:“Picture-comprehension” test and “Picture-elicited-production” test(three items representing three different types of recursive structures are included in each test).Thirty adults are served as the control group. All the subjects are native speakers of Chinese. The data show that there are significant differences among children in different age groups in acquiring recursive structures, but no such difference is found between different genders. Children’s acquisition of recursive structures and their ages are in a direct proportion. The study further explores the acquisition sequence of three different types of recursive structures. The results show that children acquire left-branching or right-branching recursive structures much earlier than that of center-embedded recursive structures. What’s more, there is a significant difference between left-branching or right-branching recursive structures and center-embedded recursive structures, but no such difference is found between left-branching and right-branching recursive structures in both tests. Children above four years old can comprehend either left-branching or right-branching recursive structures, and above six years old can produce them the same performance as adults. However, children cannot comprehend or produce center-embedded recursive structures as the performance of adults until eight.The findings of the present study are supportive of Chomsky’s Innateness Theory which claims that children’s language acquisition depends on the natural language device in mind, instead of the language environment. The study is also in accordance with the Chomsky hierarchy, which covers left-branching and right-branching recursive structures within FSG(finite state grammar) but center-embedded recursive structures within CFG(context free grammar).