Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.

Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic

“…Our findings therefore point to a developmental shift concerning children’s and adults’ ordering preferences–akin to what has previously been observed for influences of information structure [ 69 ]. For instance, when children and adults were asked to name two different objects one of which they had encountered before, adults preferred to mention old/or given information first, whereas children displayed a novelty bias, mentioning a new entity before old information [ 69 , 70 ]. Thus, children and adults show contrastive ordering preferences–a finding that also pertains to our results.…”

Reference production in Mandarin–English bilingual preschoolers: Linguistic, input, and cognitive factors

“…While the clause-initial position is typically associated with highly accessible referents (e.g., already mentioned, hence activated, and accessible) in adult speech, it may also be associated with novelty and change, resulting in new information being mentioned first ( Bock et al, 2004 ). It has been shown that young children organize their sentences prioritizing novelty rather than accessibility, preferring to highlight new information first ( Chen and Narasimhan, 2018 ; Chen et al, 2020 ). The preverbal preference observed in our study is consistent with these studies.…”

“…For children, previous studies showed that monolinguals overproduce definite nominals in English/Mandarin (Hickmann et al, 1996;Wu et al, 2015) and differ from adults by showing no preference for the "old-before-new" word order (Chen and Narasimhan, 2018;Chen et al, 2020). For Mandarin-English bilingual children, a question is how they cope with dual input in developing target-like reference use.…”

“…English/Mandarin monolingual children were less likely to use the “old-before-new” word order than adults ( Chen and Narasimhan, 2018 ; Chen et al, 2020 ). Given this, we expect no preference for postverbal INTROs over preverbal INTROs in either language of the bilingual children.…”

“…Apart from choice of elements inside the NP, adult speakers manipulate word order to mark the new/old distinction, preferring the “old-before-new” word order. Young children, however, exhibit a preference for ordering new information before old information (e.g., German: Narasimhan and Dimroth, 2008 ) or display no ordering preference (e.g., English: Chen and Narasimhan, 2018 ; Mandarin: Chen et al, 2020 ). Though not always the case, bilingual children have been reported to show uses of REs that differentiate them from monolingual children, producing non-target-like forms unattested in monolingual children ( Zhou et al, 2021 ; Zhou and Yip, 2021 ), and using linguistic forms to overtly mark definiteness to an excessive extent ( Aalberse et al, 2017 ).…”