The Syntax-Semantics Interface in a Child's Path: A Study of 3- to 11-Year-Olds' Elicited Production of Mandarin...

The generative literature presents diverse viewpoints on the relationship between children's syntax acquisition and semantics acquisition. This study explored the issue by examining Mandarin-speaking children's production of recursive relative clauses under different semantic conditions. A 4 (syntactic types) × 2 (semantic conditions) × 10 (age) design was utilized. The syntactic types include: subject-gapped relative clauses within object-gapped relative clauses, object-gapped relative clauses within object-gapped relative clauses, object-gapped relative clauses within subject-gapped relative clauses, and subject-gapped relative clauses within subject-gapped relative clauses. Each syntactic type was tested under both irreversible and reversible internal semantics (IIS and RIS, respectively). Participants were exposed to speech-visual stimuli providing specific irreversible external semantics (IES). The study included 359 Mandarin-speaking children aged 3 to 11, along with 80 adult controls. The results show that children produced the four types of recursive relative clauses in the IIS-IES condition 1 to 3 years earlier than those in the RIS-IES condition. Our findings support a refined syntax-semantics interface theory, involving a two-stage developmental path in language acquisition: The language acquisition device starts with a syntax-IIS interface and progresses to a syntax-IES interface.