Patterns Different from the Target Sentences in the Imitation Task….82

The fourth research question aims to examine the production patterns different from the target structures in the IM task and it is expected that this investigation would help understand children’s language development of Mandarin Chinese conditionals.

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There were five non-target patterns of production found in response to the target structures in the IM task, such as Insertion, Omission, Substitution, Wrong order and Other patterns (i.e., Others). Insertion refers to the situation where the subjects employed a new form, like conditional adverbials (i.e., if-words) or adverbials in either the antecedent or consequent clause as in (4). Omission is related to the deletion of key if-words and adverbials or other categories as in (5). Then, Substitution means that the children use another word to replace the target form as in (6). Wrong order refers to the wrong position of words as in (7). Finally, Other patterns (i.e., Others) are silent responses, partial imitation , ungrammatical or irrelevant sentences. The example sentences of these production types are shown below:

(4) Ruguo wo shi gezi

Table 4-1 shows the frequency counts of the non-target patterns found in the IM task and the percentage of each production type:

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Table 4-1 Production Types in the Imitation Task Insertion Omission Substitution Wrong

As shown in Table 4-1, the tokens found in G1- G3 were three times more (G1: 322;

G2: 313; G3: 291) than G4 and G5 but the production types of these three groups showed different developmental patterns. Different from G1’s high percentage of Other patterns (45.7%), G2 (26.2%) and G3 (8.9%) had a lower percentage of this production type. Moreover, G4’s and G5’s error tokens (G4: 109/ G5: 134) were relatively fewer than those found in G1-G3, implying that G4, at a transitional stage of conditional acquisition, and G5 and the control group performed alike. Lastly, the total production tokens of the control group (26 tokens) were significantly fewer than any other experimental groups.

With regard to the trend of production types among these groups, Insertion occupied the largest portion in G2-G5 (G2: 37.4%, G3: 44.3, G4: 52.3%, G5: 71.6%) and the control group (77%), showing that the subjects mainly used an unmarked clause-initial conditional adverbial ruguo ‘if’ even though the target structure did not contain this word:

(9) Ruguo wo shi maxituan houzi dehua, ……

If I am circus monkey if

‘If I were a circus monkey, …… (taken from G2S8)

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Other patterns occupied the largest percentage of the production types in G1. Another noteworthy phenomenon was that the gradual ascendance of Insertion (from G1 to Control: 9.6% to 77%) was along with the descendent tendency of Other patterns in the IM task (from G1 to Control: 45.7% to 3.8%).

Aside from the dominant use of ruguo ‘if’ in Insertion, some subjects employed Omission in production. They omitted the unmarked conditional adverbial ruguo ‘if’

(Type 2), the marked ones such as dehua ‘if’ (i.e. clause-final conditional adverbial in Type 3) or shei ‘if whoever was’(Type 5). For instance, some of the subjects in G1 employed Omission (23%) to delete any if-words and their utterances consisted of the least units. However, the use of Omission by G2 (26.5%) and G3 (34.4%) and the older subjects showed a discrepant trend. They deleted one and added another conditional adverbial at one target structure, employing ruguo ‘if’ but deleting dehua

‘if’(Type 3) or shei ‘if whoever was’ (Type 5) at the same time, as shown in (10)⁵:

(10) Ruguo wo shi xingxing, ……

if I am star

‘If I were a star, …… (taken from G3S1)

With regard to Substitution, G1-G2 tended to express temporal or causal structures to paraphrase the target sentences of Type 3, as exemplified in (11). However, G3-G5 and the control group produced a modal word like hui ‘will’ or verb yao ‘want’ to replace the adverbial (i.e., jiu) that we designed in the IT task.

(11) Yinwei wo you guizi, ……

because I have cabinet

‘Because I have a cabinet, (taken from G1S2)

The strategy of Wrong order and Other patterns are addressed. Wrong order occupied        

5 (10) shows that the subject deleted shei ‘if whoever was’ and added ruguo ‘if’.

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a relatively small percentage among these groups (around 2 %). As for Other patterns, it mostly occurred in G1 (45.7%) and it decreased abruptly in G3.

As for the percentage of production types in each group, it was found that the tendency of the production types was similar in G3-G5 and the control group, as can be seen in (12):

(12) G1: Others＞Omission＞Substitution＞Insertion＞Wrong order G2: Insertion＞Omission＞Others＞Substitution＞Wrong order G3: Insertion＞Omission＞Substitution＞Others＞Wrong order G4: Insertion＞Omission＞Substitution＞Wrong order＞Others G5: Insertion＞Omission＞Substitution＞Others＞Wrong order Control: Insertion＞Substitution＞Omission＞Others＞Wrong order

In sum, it was found that most of the subjects made non-target patterns which were derived from the marked target sentences (Type 3 and Type 5) and that they tended to employed Insertion or Omission to avoid the marked patterns.

4.4.2 General Discussion about Production Analysis

Based on the results above, some findings of the production data different from the target sentences (i.e., the utterances given 0 or 0.5 points) in L1 conditional acquisition are discussed as follows.

Firstly, it can be seen that Insertion was a strategy commonly used by the experimental and the control groups. This finding confirmed the importance of the positive evidence in L1 acquisition (Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak 1992). Because of the higher percentage of the unmarked clause-initial adverbial (ruguo ‘if’) in the corpus, our children were more likely to understand the form and produce it. In the meanwhile, it also showed that there was a gradually growing trend of Insertion in the task, demonstrating that our children’s conditional development was established from

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the unmarked forms (Givón 1991 and 1995) and recognized ruguo ‘if’ as a typical conditional adverbial to produce Chinese conditionals just like if in English. Besides, their strategy use indicated that their competence preceded their performance (Bowerman 1986, Harris et al. 1996). Furthermore, the frequent distribution of Insertion conformed to the assumption that initial conditional clauses presented an explicit background for materials that follows. In the meanwhile, initial conditional clauses had discourse organizational function because they broke the discourse into several units, framing the events in the consequent clause (Huang and Chui 1997, Wang 1996).

In addition, the employment of Omission demonstrated that our children were capable of processing unmarked or marked cases such as dehua ‘if’ in Type 3 or shei

‘if whoever was’ in Type 5 and chose to reject these forms because they were not acquired well in their language production. For instance, G1 tended to delete every unmarked or marked conditional adverbials (i.e., if words) without adding any other words. G1’s shorter utterances without if-words accorded to the “Topic construction:

Topic(S)-V” stated in Chao (1968) and Tsao (1990) since the subject in an antecedent clause (i.e., if-clause) serves as a topic, presenting a piece of information as given (Wang 1996), and the consequent clause is a comment. In addition, the topic itself helps establish a special, temporal, or personal domain for the following comment (Chafe 1976). Thus, out children’s shorter utterances were equipped with a temporal interpretation, which guided them to conditional processing. Another suggestion shown from G1’s production was that if-clauses without if-words could not only be a chain itself but also a plain or “unmarked” topic chain (Tsao 1990:345), implying the structure as an unmarked type presented in Section 4.1.3.

Concerning the strategy of Substitution, our children’s temporal or causal sentences were produced to substitute for conditionals. First, it was commonly

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presented that temporal clauses emerged earlier than conditionals (Reilly 1983 and 1986, Bowerman 1986). For some children, there would be several ways of allotting to the shared semantic functions when a form was acquired first at the initial stage of acquiring conditionals. Second, temporal sentences, introducing and shifting time references and/or offering contrast (Wang 1996), were like conditionals for our subjects since both of the structures produced a frame, requiring management and attention (Ford 1993), for the following information through a special mechanism in the initial position. With regard to the causal sentences as a replacement of conditionals, it has been claimed that our view of causality might be established on a judgment about the contrast between what happened and what might have happened (Mackie 1974), implying hypothetical and counterfactual interpretations to a certain extent. It was also claimed that children’s causal analyses preceded and guide their counterfactual thinking (Mackie 1974, Harris et al. 1996). In terms of the argument, there might be a significantly psychological link between handling counterfactual and causal reasoning (Roese and Olson 1995, Roese 1997). To sum up, it is noteworthy that conditional, temporal and causal sentence structures, denoting the hierarchy of children’s language development, are psychologically related to a certain extent.

In addition to substitution of temporal and causal sentences, our preschoolers’

order of conditionals was often wo you ‘I have’ or wo yao ‘I want,’ indirectly demonstrating theri egocentrism but it was a normal development (Piaget 1959).

Moreover, the subject’s wrong order occupied the least portion in the production data, still lending a strong support for positive evidence (Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak 1992) that children tended to utter forms that they frequently exposed to the stimulus in their textbooks or storybooks.

Lastly, our subjects’ non-target production mostly sprang from the marked types (Type 3 and Type 5). The situation accounted for the complicated nature of these two

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types that dehua ‘if’ in Type 3 required more processing time and shei ‘if whoever was’ is an indefinite pronoun with existential reading (Chierchia 2000)