It has been reported that different task formats would elicit different experimental results. A comprehension task enables researchers to test children’s sensitivity to different aspects of language and an elicited production task helps to evoke the target sentences which might occur rarely in children’s spontaneous speech (McDaniel et al., 1996). Therefore, the fourth research question aims to discuss the task effects on children’s acquisition of the pronominal renjia. Section 4.4.1 shows an overall comparison between the PS and the IM tasks. A general discussion about the task effects on our children’s acquisition of the pronominal renjia is presented in Section 4.4.2.
4.4.1 Overall Findings
In order to distinguish between the subjects’ comprehension and production of the pronominal renjia, two tasks were employed in the present study. The PS task is designed as a comprehension task and the IM task is designed as an elicited production task to explore Chinese children’s competence in and performance on this pronominal. Figure 4-5 presents an overall comparison of the subjects’ responses to the PS and the IM tasks.
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Figure 4-5 Subjects’ Performances on the PS Task and the IM Task
As can be seen in Figure 4-5, our children did a better job on the PS task than on the IM task. Table 4-6 further shows the within-group differences between the two tasks in each group.
Table 4-6 The p values of Subjects’ Responses to the PS Task and the IM Task
G1 G2 G3 G4 G5 Control
F 22.512 5.352 4.318 12.116 11.213 4.711
P .000* .035* 0.47* .003* .004* .053
In Table 4-6, we can see all the experimental groups performed significantly better on the PS task than on the IM task (G1: F (1, 30) = 22.512, p < .001, G2: F (1, 30) = 5.352, p
< .05, G3: F (1, 30) = 4.318, p < .05, G4: F (1, 30) = 12.116, p < .01, G5: F (1,30) = 11.213, p < .01), indicating that our children’s production was later than their comprehension in the
acquisition of the pronominal renjia. To contrast, the control group did a slightly better job on the IM task than on the PS task, though no significant difference was found (G1: F (1, 30) = 4.771, p > .05).
With regard to the between-group comparison, G4 performed significantly better than G1-G2 (p < .01), and G4-G5 showed no significant difference with the control group (p > .05) on the PS task. As for the IM task, G4 also significantly performed better than G1-G2 (p
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< .001), but the control group still significantly outperformed all the experimental groups (p
< .05).
4.4.2 General Discussion
In the previous literature, different task formats have been employed in the study of L1 acquisition (Brown, 1987; Ingram, 1989; Lust et al., 1987). To understand the subjects’
competence in and performance on the interpretation of the pronominal renjia, a comprehension task (the PS task) and a production task (the IM task) were employed in the present study. The major findings about the task effects are discussed as follows. First of all, it was found that all our children performed better on the PS task than on the IM task, regardless of different interpretation patterns, referential directions, and referent types. This finding supported the generally-accepted claim that children’s comprehension exceeds their production and their pronominal competence was prior to their performance (Huang, 2011;
Lust et al., 1986). In Lust et al. (1986), it was found that the children performed better on the comprehension task than on the elicited production task regarding the pronominal anaphora in L1 acquisition. Aside from pronominal acquisition, the results of the present study were in accord with the other documented findings of L1 acquisition in other linguistic aspects.
Benedict (1979) argued for the priority of comprehension to production in lexical development. Similar task effects were found in Brown (1987) that the subjects showed a better performance on the comprehension of relative clauses. Lin (2008) also stated that her children’s comprehension on double object construction was better than their production. The findings of Reilly (1982) that the subjects could produce sentences they did not fully understand were not found in our study. However, the adults of the present study performed better on the IM task, a result in accordance with Huang’s (2011). Huang attributed her result to the nature of the elicited imitation task. After the subjects achieved their mature control of producing certain structures, they seldom made mistakes in imitation (Huang, 2011).
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Furthermore, the correlation between the results of an elicited imitation task and that of a natural speech study has been found in children’s production in early syntax (Lust & Mervis, 1980; Lust et al., 1980). As discussed in Section 3.2, children do not passively copy the stimuli in the elicited imitation task (Lust et al., 1999). Children’s performance on the elicited imitation task requires their reconstruction of stimuli and comprehensively targets their knowledge of grammatical structures (Lust & Chien, 1984). In line with the evidence, our children’s substitution of the pronominal renjia with its corresponding personal pronouns in production validated the elicited imitation task in the present study.
To sum up, an overall comparison between the PS and the IM tasks showed that our children aged 7 (G4) have acquired adult-like comprehension of the pronominal renjia. This age was relatively later than the age found in the previous studies about pronoun acquisition in Chinese (e.g., Huang, 2011). The result might be due the fact that the pronominal renjia is more semantically complex than other pronominals, which contributes to a higher degree of learnability for the children. Finally, a completely mature level of pronominal production might occur after the age of 8, since all the experimental groups (4~8-year-olds) still significantly performed worse than the control groups on the production task.