Semantic Effects On The Acquisition Of Recursive Possessives In Mandarin-Speaking Children

Recursive possessives are difficult to acquire and emerge relatively late in children’s language,the reasons behind which,surprisingly,have not been thoroughly investigated.Semantics,as a crucial branch in language,determines the meaning identification and decoding.On this account,our study,based on a well-designed experiment,aims to explore whether semantics influences the acquisition of recursive possessives and,if so,how semantics interacts with syntax in the acquisition of recursion.After observing the asymmetricity within the syntactic module,this paper predicts that there may be an asymmetric relationship in the mapping of syntactic and semantic modules and tries to find out the external representation of that relationship in acquisition.Also,this study is to provide empirical evidence for the Weak Continuity Hypothesis.This study recruits 43 monolingual Mandarin-speaking children aged from 4 to 7 years old and 12 adult controls through personal networks and language training institutions,and designs an elicited production task with a Truth Value Judgment component for data collection to investigate children’s acquisition of recursive possessives with six types of semantic relations.And there are 28 items incorporating 18 test sentences,6 pre-test sentences,and 4 fillers.Without exception,all target sentences are two-level recursive possessives,with the only difference being in the semantic relations.Our data are collected in Shandong and Jiangsu provinces by two researchers in March 2021.After analyzing the data,this study presents the following findings.First,children and adults share a common grammar system and children’s competence in producing recursive structures gets enriched with age;however,it is noted that children may resort to one-level recursion and other responses as alternatives before they can freely produce two-level recursive sequences,which is a difference between child’s and adult’s grammar.Second,it is shown that children acquire two-level recursive possessives at the age of 4 or later depending on the semantic relation carried on syntactic structures.Third,the results uncover that the mapping between syntax and semantics is asymmetric,indicating that one type of recursive structure maps onto several semantic types,but not vice versa;and the fact that children have already acquired certain semantic types,for instance,Type A,does not imply they have grasped that structure with all kinds of semantic relations.The findings in this research provide empirical support for the Asymmetric Hypothesis which predicts an asymmetric mapping between syntax and semantics in acquisition,and also lend support to the Weak Continuity Hypothesis that contends a gradual development of children’s language.