A Study of Mandarin Children's Acquisition of Recursive Relative Clauses

Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch published a paper in Science in 2002, emphasizing that the faculty of language in the narrow sense is recursive and this trait is exclusive to humans.Since then there has been a lot of theoretical and experimental research on children’s acquisition of recursive structures, but little on recursive clauses (RCs).This paper aims at a theoretical and experimental study of children’s acquisition of RCs, first constructing a definition system of recursion, dividing recursion into tail, nested and mixed recursion, and then recruiting 249 mandarin-speaking children aged 4-9 and 46 adults to conduct a “picture-elicited-minimal-pair production” experiment.The main findings are as follows: children acquire 2-level tail-recursion RCs at 7, 2-level mixed-recursion RCs at 9, and 2-level nested-recursion RCs at least at 10, showing that different types of recursive sequences are acquired at significantly different ages.The results in this study and some neurolinguistic findings in the literature are in mutual corroboration.The paper also finds that semantic factors like animacy can significantly influence the acquisition of 2-level recursive sequences.