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Mandarin-learning 19-month-old toddlers’ sensitivity to word order cues that differentiate unaccusative and unergative verbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2022

Ziqi WANG ,
Xiaolu YANG  and
Rushen SHI
Ziqi WANG
Affiliation:
1Tsinghua University, China
Xiaolu YANG*
Affiliation:
2Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Rushen SHI
Affiliation:
2Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
*
*Corresponding author: Xiaolu Yang, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 10084, China. E-mail: xlyang@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
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Abstract

Languages employ different means to manifest the unaccusative-unergative distinction. In Mandarin Chinese, unaccusative verbs are allowed in the inversion construction “V-le NP”, while unergative verbs are not. This grammaticality contrast brings a presence/absence contrast between the two verb classes in the inversion construction in the input. Using an eye fixation task, we investigated whether Mandarin-learning 19-month-olds were sensitive to this specific input frequency contrast. We found that infants distinguished the grammatical versus ungrammatical uses of the two verb classes in the inversion construction “V-le NP” (Experiment 1). When the verb classes were in the “NP V-le” order (Experiment 2) (i.e., the same level of grammaticality), infants showed no evidence of a looking difference. These responses indicate toddlers’ sensitivity to the distribution of the two verb classes in the inversion construction. This distributional information is likely to be one of the potential cues that facilitate their acquisition of the unaccusative-unergative distinction.

Keywords

early language acquisitionunaccusativityword orderinput frequencyMandarin Chinese
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , March 2024 , pp. 249 - 270
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© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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