A Developmental Study of Event Representation of Caused State Change

Language acquisition and cognitive development have been important research questions in several branches of linguistic studies.The central debate lies in whether language acquisition is influenced by principles of language universals or language specifics.At present, domestic studies on this question focus much on motion events and there are heated debates on related issues.This research examined the development of event representation of Mandarin Chinese native speakers from the perspective of cognitive semantics by focusing on the encoding of events of caused state change.By carrying out an elicitation task on 160 subjects of four children groups and an adult group, this study addresses the semantic and cognitive features of Mandarin speakers in the domain of caused state change.The major findings are: 1) the linguistic development of Mandarin speakers in the domain of caused state change is predominantly influenced by the language typology of their mother language.In terms of lexicalization patterns, from the beginning of language development Mandarin speakers frequently use verb complement constructions with manner verbs as a salient category; 2) the linguistic development is also influenced by cognitive factors, thus the following aspects become mature with the increase of age and cognition, including lexicalization patterns, windowing of attention and semantic completeness; 3) the language production of Mandarin Chinese is also influenced by language input.Based on the differences between different genders, we put forward the "Hypothesis of Different Early Language Input."