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Noun-Modifying Clause Construction in Mandarin-Speaking Children.

Mengyao Shang¹, Ziyin Mai¹, Stephen Matthews²

¹https://ror.org/00t33hh48The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

Journal of Child Language

|July 14, 2026

Summary

Mandarin children acquire noun-modifying clause constructions (NMCCs) early, around age two. Argument NMCCs appear first, followed by adjunct and extended types, supporting a developmental hierarchy.

Keywords:

Mandarin Chinese child language corpus elicited imitation grammatical development language acquisition

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Published on: April 1, 2016

Area of Science:

Linguistics
Developmental Psychology
Psycholinguistics

Background:

Noun-modifying clause constructions (NMCCs) in Mandarin involve head nouns encoding arguments, adjuncts, or extended participants of clausal events.
Understanding the developmental trajectory of NMCCs in Mandarin-speaking children is crucial for linguistic acquisition research.

Purpose of the Study:

To propose and test a developmental hierarchy of NMCCs in Mandarin.
To investigate the early emergence and acquisition patterns of argument, adjunct, and extended NMCCs in child Mandarin.

Main Methods:

Analysis of 728 NMCC tokens from 369 Mandarin-speaking children (aged 1;2-6;9) in naturalistic corpora.
A contextualized sentence repetition task with 121 Mandarin-speaking children (aged 3;0-4;11) in China.

Main Results:

NMCCs emerge surprisingly early in Mandarin-speaking children, around 2;0 years of age.
Argument NMCCs demonstrate developmental primacy in both frequency and accuracy.
Adjunct and extended NMCCs are acquired at later stages, aligning with the proposed developmental hierarchy.

Conclusions:

The study supports a developmental hierarchy of NMCCs in Mandarin: argument > adjunct > extended.
Early acquisition of NMCCs in Mandarin highlights the complex linguistic abilities of young children.
Findings contribute to typological and developmental frameworks of clause-noun modification.