Open AccessRevisiting C hinese‐speaking children's understanding of argument structure
Author(s) -
Jiang Lu,
Haryu Etsuko
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
japanese psychological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.392
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5884
pISSN - 0021-5368
DOI - 10.1111/jpr.12036
Subject(s) - argument (complex analysis) , verb , causative , transitive relation , linguistics , sentence , event (particle physics) , noun , psychology , task (project management) , ellipsis (linguistics) , mathematics , philosophy , combinatorics , medicine , physics , management , quantum mechanics , economics
A causative verb is likely to appear in a sentence with two noun arguments, whereas a noncausative verb tends to appear in a sentence with a single argument. The present research investigates from what point children learning C hinese begin to show this knowledge of argument structure. Two‐, 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐old children were tested using a forced‐choice pointing task. The results showed that C hinese‐speaking children aged 2 years could associate a transitive construction with a causative event, whereas they were not able to map an intransitive construction to a noncausative event even after reaching 5 years of age. The reason why C hinese children have such difficulty in learning knowledge of intransitive construction is discussed, focusing on (a) the semantic properties of certain intransitive verbs, which have been found not only in C hinese but also in other languages, and (b) the ellipsis of arguments, which is characteristic of C hinese.