Open AccessC hinese‐Speaking Adults' Understanding of Argument Structure
Author(s) -
Jiang Lu,
Haryu Etsuko
Publication year - 2016
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.12108
Subject(s) - causative , transitive relation , sentence , verb , object (grammar) , syntax , argument (complex analysis) , subject (documents) , linguistics , semantics (computer science) , event (particle physics) , resultative , psychology , mathematics , artificial intelligence , computer science , combinatorics , philosophy , physics , medicine , astrophysics , library science , programming language
Syntactic constructions roughly correspond to sentence meanings. Jiang and Haryu (2014) found that C hinese children can associate subject‐verb‐object ( SVO ) constructions with causative events at age 2, but do not always map subject‐verb ( SV ) constructions to noncausative events, even after reaching 5 years of age. The latter results may be attributed to the fact that C hinese allows argument‐dropping. That is, an SV sentence in C hinese sometimes includes an intransitive verb, but other times includes a transitive verb with the object dropped. This paper investigated C hinese adults' knowledge of syntax‐semantics correspondence. Experiment 1 found that C hinese adults did not always map SV sentences to noncausative events, while they almost always mapped SVO sentences to causative events. Experiment 2 found that they preferred to use SV and SVO constructions to describe noncausative and causative events, respectively. C hinese adults understand that causative and noncausative events should typically be described using transitive and intransitive constructions, respectively. However, when inferring to which event (causative or noncausative) the given sentence should be mapped, their performance seems to be regulated by actual SV sentence usage in C hinese.