Poster #107 - Children’s Knowledge of Event Culmination in Mandarin Chinese

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Languages differ in how they express the meaning of event culmination, and children have to learn the relevant devices specific to their language. Previous acquisition studies have shown that English-speaking children became sensitive to the completion entailment of verb phrases modified by verb particles such as ‘eat up’ early from age three (van Hout, 1998). Mandarin-speaking children could also recognize the “change-of-state” reading associated with resultative [V1-V2] verb compounds at around the same age (Chen, 2017). They, however, could not reliably rule out the “no-state-change” or “zero-result” reading until age five (van Hout et al., 2017).

Given that these studies have only focused on transitive sentences taking an overt object where the resultant state is realized on, the present study aims to investigate how children understand event culmination from a novel angle, through looking at intransitive sentences containing the Mandarin aspectual verb wán ‘finish’ as the second element of a [V1-V2] verb compound, where wán refers to the final temporal segment of an event (i.e. post-state of the characteristic activity). Using a Truth Value Judgment task (Crain and Thornton, 1998), we tested 76 Taiwan Mandarin children aged 4;4-6;8 in a between-subject design on either intransitive sentences taking a [V-wán] verb compound or the corresponding sentences taking a simple verb [V]. The participants were asked to judge the test sentences upon hearing stories depicting a “post-state” or an “in-state” situation narrated by the experimenter in the form of picture sequences with the Condition of Plausible Dissent satisfied. Three of the test trials presented a “post-state” situation (completed event), in which the event was completed and the individual denoted by the subject noun phrase was no longer in the state described by the verb phrase, and another three trials presented an “in-state” situation (incomplete event), in which the event was not completed and the individual was still in the state described by the verb phrase. Participants also received training and filler trials.

Our results show that Mandarin-speaking children were sensitive to the meaning of event culmination expressed by the aspectual verb wán early from the age of four, accepting the “post-state” reading more readily than the “in-state” reading (68.4% vs. 22.8%). An age effect was found, with the six-year-olds accepting the “post-state” reading and rejecting the “in-state” reading (73.3% vs. 16.7%, N=20) more distinctively than the four- and five-year-olds (63.0% vs. 29.6%, N=18), suggesting that the acquisition of event culmination is more challenging in intransitive contexts and thus children have not fully grasped it by age five. Children also accepted the “in-state” reading at a comparable rate as previously reported. In addition, children’s knowledge of wán is reflected in a higher acceptance of the “post-state” reading on the wán-sentences than the wán-less ones (68.4% vs. 46.7%), and a lower acceptance of the “in-state” reading on the former than the latter (29.6% vs. 96.3%). Taken together, our findings demonstrate children’s sensitivity to event culmination in intransitive contexts modified by the aspectual verb wán ‘finish’, but children encountered similar learning challenges as previously reported.

Author

• Margaret Lei, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
  Presenting Author