EXPRESS: La interfaz sintaxis-semántica en el camino de un niño: Un estudio de la producción elicitada de cláusulas...

As for the syntax-semantic relationship, there have been two conflicting views in the literature, debating whether children's development of syntax is dependent on semantics or not. This study delved into this problem by studying Mandarin-speaking children's elicited production of recursive relative clauses (RCs) in different semantic conditions. A 4 (Syntactic Types) × 2 (Semantic Conditions) × 10 (Age) design was used. The syntactic types included: subject-gapped RC in object-gapped RC, object-gapped RC in object-gapped RC, object-gapped RC in subject-gapped RC, and subject-gapped RC in subject-gapped RC. Each type was tested under irreversible internal semantics (IIS) and reversible internal semantics (RIS). Moreover, participants received speech-visual stimuli providing irreversible external semantics (IES). The study recruited 359 Mandarin-speaking children (aging from 3-11 years old) and 80 adult controls. The findings indicate that children produced the four types of recursive RCs in the IIS-IES condition one to three years earlier than their counterparts in the RIS-IES condition. The findings supports a modified syntax-semantics interface theory which involves a two-stage development path in the acquisition of syntax: The language acquisition device starts with a syntax-IIS interface and ends with a syntax-IES interface.