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Abstract

Abstract

The present study investigates early acquisition of complement control by Mandarin-speaking children. We tested thirty-two Mandarin-speaking 2-month-olds in a comprehension experiment adopting the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm and assessed their ability to choose the right controller of the empty subject PRO. Speech stimuli included four sentence types: subject control ‘want’ sentences, covert object control ‘let’ sentences, overt object control ‘ask’ sentences and benefactive coverb ‘for’ sentences. It was found that when comprehending test sentences with two potential antecedents, children’s target looking was significantly above chance by looking more to the subject picture in subject control trials and non-control trials, and that a marginal significant difference was identified for the two minimal pairs (subject control vs. covert object control , non-control vs. overt object ). The results also point to a stronger sensitivity to subject control than to object control. These results show that Mandarin-speaking children who have just entered their second year in life are already sensitive to control, suggesting their emerging knowledge of some basic syntactic properties of complement control.

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2025-11-09

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Mandarin-speaking two-year-olds’ comprehension of complement control
International Journal of Chinese Linguistics 12, 189 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1075/ijchl.24006.yan
/content/journals/10.1075/ijchl.24006.yan
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): complement control; early language comprehension; language acquisition; preferential looking

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