The Acquisition Of Giving-type Double Object Construction In Mandarin-speaking Children

In recent years,double object construction has been a hot topic among linguists at home and abroad.Even so,the acquisition study about this structure is insufficient.Furthermore,previous scholars tend to make a systematical description about its acquisition process.In order to study children’s acquisition for a certain structure,this paper chooses the typical giving-type double object construction,and the structure form is‘NP1+gei+NP2+NP3’.This thesis studies how children produce and comprehend the target structure,and it consists of two experiments.Experiment one is an elicited production task,in which subjects are induced to produce the target sentences in given contexts.Experiment two is a video verification task,in which subjects are required to judge the truth of test items from video clips.Experiment one aims to explore whether children can produce the target structure and whether the target structure is the dominant word order to express the giving meaning.Through three videos,subjects are expected to produce Gege gei-le jiejie yi-ge pingguo,Gege gei-le jiejei yi-gen xiangjiao and Gege gei-le jiejie yi-ge lizi.Experiment two is set to investigate whether children can understand the target structure.The present author set three test sentences in total.The first is the target structure ‘NP1+gei+NP2+NP3’,the second is a wrong sturcture ‘NP2+gei+NP1+NP3’,the third is still a wrong structure ‘NP1+gei+NP3+NP2’.In two experiments,128 children of four ages(2;5-3;0,3;0-4;0,4;0-5;0,5;0-6;0)were tested,and they were divided into four class groups(nursery class;junior class;middle class;senior class).Meanwhile,adults with the same number are also chosen as a control group.According to the results of experiment one,only one out of sixteen children in nursery class can produce the target structure.On contrast,3;0-6;0-year-old children possess the production ability.As they grow up,their ability becomes stronger.Besides,the production amount of target structure is the largest among all structures.The results of experiment two show that children in nursery class can understand the word order of the target structure,but they are too young to comprehend the test item two and three.All 3;0-6;0-year-old children can understand test item one.And Most of them can understand test item two,few of them can comprehend test item three.Consequently,we can conclude: in terms of the production,2;5-3;0-year-old children can hardly produce the target structure while 3;0-6;0-year-old children can,and the target structure is the dominant word order to express giving meaning.Similarly,the children aged between 2;5 and 6;0 can comprehend the word order of the target structure,but they are not sensitive enough to the positions of three arguments.