Estudis sobre la sintaxi primerenca del xinès mandarí
- Autores: Jingtao Zhu
- Directores de la Tesis: Anna Gavarró (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: catalán
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Maria Teresa Guasti (presid.), Barbara Höhle (secret.), Xiaolu Yang (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia Cognitiva y Lenguaje por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona; la Universidad de Barcelona y la Universidad Rovira i Virgili
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
While many studies address the emergence of phonological awareness from birth, little is known about the development of syntax in infancy. In this dissertation I offer a corpus-based study and two experiments on the development of syntax in Mandarin Chinese and present novel results that challenge lexical approaches to language acquisition (e.g., Abbot-Smith & Tomasello, 2006; Tomasello, 2003) and also the role of frequency. The corpus study based on the spontaneous speech of 47 typically-developing, monolingual-Mandarin speaking children (between the age of 1;2 to 6;5) shows that their performance on both null subjects and null objects has already become adult-like by 1;8, and children produce the non-canonical SbaOV construction at least when they approach their second birthday (at 1;8) and demonstrate productive knowledge at age 3-4. The relatively high frequency of null objects in Mandarin and the low frequency of the ba construction in the input should lead children to drop objects (i.e., post-ba NPs) in this construction at least at the early stage if frequency determines the path of acquisition. However, this prediction is not fulfilled: even at age 1;8 children produce post-ba NPs in the ba construction consistently, and this has implications against variational accounts of language acquisition (Yang, 2002, 2004). The first experiment replicates that of Franck et al. (2013) for French; with eye-tracking techniques, I compare well-formed transitive SVO sentences with ill-formed SOV sequences, all involving pseudo-verbs, when presented to infants with a mean age of 17.4 months. The results show that infants comprehended only when exposed to a grammatical sentence. Neither age nor vocabulary are predictors of performance. In the second experiment replicating Lassotta et al. (2014), ran with 24 infants with mean age 17.5 months, infants were confronted with canonical SVO and non-canonical SbaOV and OSbaOV sentences. The analysis indicates that hearing the SVO sentences causes infants to look significantly longer at the scene with the first NP as AGENT, and the same happens when they hear the SbaOV sentences. However, infants exhibit an opposite eye movement pattern when they hear the OSbaOV sentences, with more fixations on the scene with the first NP as PATIENT, indicating comprehension of all these grammatical sequences. Combining the results of the three studies I conclude that Mandarin infants are sensitive to word order at a very early age, 17.5 months at the latest. In fact, they are able to parse canonical and non-canonical word orders (the ba construction with a preverbal object, appearing either before or after the subject) which are scarce in the input, while they ignore ill-formed sequences. Therefore, these results can only be accounted for if grammatical, language-specific knowledge is available, and constitute evidence for very early parameter setting.
