Noun-Modifying Clause Construction in Mandarin-Speaking Children

In Mandarin, the head noun in [modifier clause-de-N] encodes not only the arguments or adjuncts of the clausal verbs (e.g. "John/biscuits/plate" in the event of "John eating biscuits") but also non-argument, non-adjunct participants extended from the clausal event (e.g. "crumbs" resulting from the event of "John eating biscuits"). This article adopts a typological, multi-factorial analytic framework of noun-modifying clause constructions (NMCCs) and proposes a developmental hierarchy of three types of NMCCs: argument > adjunct > extended. We tested the hierarchy in two studies: an analysis of 728 tokens of NMCC produced by 369 children (1;2-6;9) in naturalistic corpora and a contextualised sentence repetition task conducted with 121 children (3;0-4;11) in China. Our findings show that NMCC emerges surprisingly early around 2;0 in Mandarin children. Argument NMCCs show developmental primacy in frequency and accuracy. Adjunct and extended NMCCs are acquired at a later stage, consistent with the proposed hierarchy.