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3-037 - Syntactic Development in Mandarin-Speaking Children

Sat, March 23, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hilton Baltimore, Floor: Level 2, Key 2

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Mandarin provides important contrasts to Indo-European languages for researchers and clinicians interested in language development. There are important differences at every level of language, from phonology (Mandarin has lexical tone marking) through to syntax (Mandarin is highly analytic and exhibits minimal movement across sentence types), semantics (differences across and within word classes), and orthography. Many of these differences are now well explored both in adult and in child language. However, there have been very few systematic studies of Mandarin-speaking children’s syntactic development. This symposium includes four papers that address a combination of grammatical markers and sentence structures in Mandarin-speaking children. The methodology in these papers varies from parent report to comprehension and elicitation studies, with an age range from 2 to 7 years of age. The first paper addresses the earliest productions of verb markings in a normative sample of 260 toddlers, whereas the second examines morphosyntactic differences in an elicited production task between 18 language-delayed and 18 age-matched typically developing 4 through 7 year olds. The next two papers address comprehension, including comprehension of non-canonical sentence orders with ba and bei markings in 21 at-risk and 21 typically developing preschoolers, and the comprehension of Wh- questions in 715 2 through 7 year olds when combined with verbs differing in semantics (“to say,” shuo vs. “falsely believe,” yiwei). Data from children across languages and across profiles are important to provide a clearer picture of how grammatical development is related to age, vocabulary, and other child characteristics.

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