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Grammatical Aspect in Early Child Mandarin: Evidence from a Preferential Looking Experiment

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Abstract

The study assessed 30-month-old Mandarin-speaking children’s awareness of aspectual distinctions involving the perfective marker le and the imperfective marker zhe in a preferential looking experiment. In the experiment, we presented our child subjects with a choice between two video clips (one depicting a closed event and the other depicting an on-going event), in the presence of an auditory stimulus (either the le sentence, the zhe sentence or the control sentence without any aspect marker). Children’s looking behavior in the task was recorded and analyzed. The results revealed 30-month-old children’s emerging sensitivity to the aspectual contrast between le and zhe. This was manifest by an increase in looking to the closed event when hearing the le sentence and an increase in looking to the on-going event when hearing the zhe sentence. The absence of le or zhe in the control sentence did not result in any increase or decrease in looking to either event. We also found that the effect of le on children’s looking behavior was immediate whereas the effect of zhe was late. We attributed this difference to the facilitative role of le in children’s sentence processing as well as their preference for the event boundary. The results lend support to the continuity view that functional morphemes like aspect markers are available to children early in language development.

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Notes

  1. The reason we chose zhe instead of zai is that zhe, just like le, follows the verb, whereas zai precedes the verbs. We decided to use the post-verb zhe to match it with the post-verb le. This choice made it possible for us to analyze the exact same time window from the offset of the verb across the sentence types. Our on-going study of Mandarin-speaking children’s temporal reference in early production shows that aspect marker zhe has already occurred in the speech of two-year-olds and zhe is more frequently produced than zai. Evidence for early use of zhe also comes from Chen and Shirai (2010).

  2. These predicates are atelic because they describe a process that does not have an end point. We can use various tests to test their telicity. For instance, Gu (1999) suggested that atelic predicates can co-occur with the adverbial yige zhongtou ‘(for) one hour’ that measures how long the activity lasts, but telic predicates cannot. In our case, all the four predicates can co-occur with yige zhongtou, such as he yige zhongtou niunai (‘drinking milk for an hour’). However,predicates like he liangbei niunai (‘drink two glasses of milk’) are telic, thus not compatible with yige zhongtou, e.g. *he yige zhongtou liangbei niunai (‘drinking two glasses of water for one hour’).

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Funding

This study was supported by the National Social Science Grant of China (11BYY080) to Xiaolu Yang. We thank Gong Huichao, Hu Han and Cao Guanghuan for their great help with the experiment. Special thanks go to the children and their parents for active participation, support and endless inspirations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Xiaolu Yang & Kailin Xu

  2. Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada

    Rushen Shi

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  1. Xiaolu Yang
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Correspondence to Xiaolu Yang.

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Yang, X., Shi, R. & Xu, K. Grammatical Aspect in Early Child Mandarin: Evidence from a Preferential Looking Experiment. J Psycholinguist Res 47, 1301–1320 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-018-9590-7

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