Mandarin-Speaking Children’s Acquisition Of DeP Recursion

Within the framework of biolinguistics,category recursion means that a grammatical category α has among its sub-constituents a category α of the same type(Dékány,2019,p.319).Two major controversies in the existing research on children’s acquisition of category recursion are:(i)whether and how the developmental path for recursion grows up in stages;(ii)whether or not the(c)overt functional head mediating between two identical categoriesα(Di Sciullo,2015,2017)affects the acquisition of recursion.The paper provides empirical studies for clarifying the current controversies by examining the acquisition of DeP recursion in Mandarin-speaking children.The research includes two experiments.Experiment 1 examined the ability of 84Mandarin-speaking children aged 3 to 6 to compute DeP recursion of 2-to-4 levels through a pointing task,responding to the first controversy and elucidating the characteristics of how linguistic mechanism of recursion grows up.In Experiment 2,a question-answering task was employed to examine the same participants’ computation of DeP recursion with(c)overt functional De,responding to the second controversy and ascertaining the rationale behind it.The results of Experiment 1 showed that there was a step-by-step development of children’s recursive linguistic ability: 4-year-old children successfully acquired 2-and-3-level DeP recursion,while 5-year-old children fully acquired 4-level DeP recursion.The factors such as the biological maturation of the recursive mechanism and the enhancement of computational efficiency of the linguistic mechanism account for the step-by-step development.Moreover,the feature [Locative] carried by the locatives facilitates the recognition of DeP recursion that expresses spatial relations between objects,while[Locative] indicating different spatial relations does not prevent children from acquiring DeP recursion.The results of Experiment 2 indicated that overt functional heads facilitated the comprehension of recursive structures: Children at the age of 4 years and 1 month successfully acquired 2-level DeP recursion with overt De,while 2-level DeP recursion with covert De could only be fully acquired by children at the age of 4 years and 3 months.Overt functional cues are inextricably connected with the neurobiological maturation of the linguistic ability and the enhancement of computational efficiency.The study shows that the role of overt functional cues in the promotion of acquiring the first language(L1)can be predicted by the biological maturation of the language faculty,which confirms the inevitability of the overt functional cues during children’s attainment of the recursive linguistic capacity.Further,two strategies children frequently employed in avoidance of complicated recursive computations are discussed,namely,dropping and conjunction.In general,the study presents a relatively complete developmental path of recursive linguistic competence,which is the first cross-linguistic evidence for a shared path for recursion.By virtue of Mandarin DeP recursive structures,the study has also overcome the previous limitations on selecting the experimental materials,and uncovered the influence of(c)overt functional heads on the computation of recursion along with the critical period when the influence occurred.