On Mandarin-speaking Children’s Acquisition Of Control Structures And Raising Structures

Control structures and raising structures with extremely similar surface structures yet different syntactic and semantic behaviors have been intensively discussed and researched in the field of language acquisition.This research systematically investigated Mandarinspeaking children’s acquisition of control structures and raising structures with a truthvalue judgment task and a sentence grammaticality judgment task,aiming to provide more cross-linguistic evidence for research in this field.This research examined Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of two structures through their comprehension data.Thirty children aged from three to five years old performed the truth-value judgment task and another thirty did the sentence grammaticality judgment task.Ten adults were recruited as a control group for each experiment.Three control verbs(jueding ’decide’,dǎsuàn ’plan’,jìxù ’continue’)and three raising verbs(kenéng ’possible’,róngyì ’easy’ and yinggai ’should’)were used in the truth-value judgment task,and four control verbs(tingzhi ’stop’,xiǎng ’wish’,gǎn ’dare’ and ken ’be willing to’)and four raising verbs(sìhu ’seem’,kànqilái ’look like’,hǎoxiàng ’seem’ and nán ’difficult’)were used in the sentence grammaticality judgment task.All the testing sentences were read by one experimenter and recorded in advance to minimize the influence of irrelevant variables.The truth-value judgment task attempts to answer the research question(1)At what age can Mandarin-speaking children acquire raising structures and control structures respectively?And the sentence grammaticality judgment task aims to answer the research question(2)Is there a control bias or a default raising analysis in Mandarin-speaking children’s initial language development?If there is,at what age are children able to distinguish between raising structures and control structures?Results of the truth-value judgment task indicate that children’s performance in control structures reach an adult stage of maturation at the age of four.In contrast,although most children at this age have no difficulty with raising structures,a more adult-like pattern emerges for children at the age of five,one year later than control structures.Moreover,children have better performance in control than raising structures and they cannot acquire both structures until turning to five years old,which is consistent with the predictions by Universal Phase Requirement.Results of the sentence grammaticality judgment task show that before children’s full mastery of control structures and raising structures,children hold a default raising analysis of control structures in initial years.More specifically,three-year-old children in this experiment tend to coerce a control structure into a raising analysis by not attending to the semantic relation between the subjects and the control verbs.When turning 4 years old,children began to reject control structures with an inanimate subject.A breakthrough arises at the age of five when children could distinguish between control and raising structures in an adult-like manner.This study is among the first to systematically examine Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of control structures and raising structures,providing a piece of cross-linguistic evidence to the research body of control structures and raising structures in the field of language acquisition.