自動詞・他動詞構文の理解の発達 : 中国語を母語とする子どもの場合

概要

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The meaning of a given verb roughly corresponds to the types of sentence in which the verb appears. Causative verbs typically appear in sentences with two noun arguments (a subject and an object), and non-causative verbs typically appear in sentences with one argument (a subject). The present study examined whether Mandarin-speaking children utilize the number of arguments to infer the sentence meaning involving a novel verb. Two, three, and four year-old children (N=40, for each age group) were shown two test videos depicting a causative and a non-causative event, and asked to choose one that matched the given sentence, a transitive or intransitive sentence involving a novel verb. The results showed that Mandarin-speaking two-year-olds could map a transitive sentence to a causative event. In contrast, both two-year-olds and four-year-olds had difficulty with mapping an intransitive sentence to a non-causative event. Mandarin Chinese allows dropping noun arguments. Thus, when children hear a sentence with two noun arguments, the sentence depicts a causative event. However, when they hear a sentence with one argument, it is difficult to tell whether the sentence is either intransitive or transitive with an object omitted. In this respect, the children's behavior corresponds with their language input.
2010-03-10