The acquisition of Mandarin speaking children’s motion encoding

Several scholars have carried out much research on Mandarin children’s development of motion expressions (Chen, 2005; Guo & Chen, 2009; Lin, 2006;

Huang, 2012). These researchers examined many aspects of the motion expressions of children, including verb type, verb frequency, verb construction, and syntactic construction. However, the results of different genres of data seem to contradict one another. Most of the studies investigated narrative data (Chen, 2005; Guo & Chen, 2009; Lin, 2006). Chen (2005) elicited children’s narration by using the picture book Frog, where are you (Mayer, 1969), and found that children used more types of

Manner verbs than Path verbs starting from the age of three, and that the frequency of Manner was higher than that of Path in all age groups. The frequency of Ground information was lower than that of the adults, but would increase with age. Guo and Chen (2009) used the same method to collect their data, and found similar results, which is that Manner prevailed Path with respect to verb type. They have also investigated children’s motion constructions, and found the frequency order resembled to that of adults, and that M+P(+D) was the most productive construction from the age of three. Lin (2006) used animated films to collect Taiwanese children’s narrative data. The results of verb type and token concurred with that of Chen (2005) and Guo and Chen (2009). Motion construction is similar to the results of Guo and

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Chen, presenting M+P+D to be the most productive construction. These three studies above suggested that children tended to use Manner more frequently and more diversely than Path, and the frequency and diversity of Manner increased with age.

Also, the construction of M+P+D occurred with high frequency in children’s speech.

This construction is a typical characteristic of the equipollentlly-framed language, since Manner, Path and Deixis are all used in this construction.

However, the study with conversational data provided results with different patterns. There has been few studies that focus on conversational data concerning Mandarin-speaking children’s motion expressions. So far, there has been one study of Huang’s (2012) which investigated the motion expressions in daily conversation of Taiwanese children. In terms of motion verbs, she found that Manner occurred more frequently at the very beginning with the one-year-old children. Nonetheless, at the age of two, the frequency of Manner dropped, and that of Path and Deixis raised.

After the age of two, Path began to prevail Manner in frequency, and thus Huang proposed that Path was the most productive motion verb. On the other hand, with regard to motion construction, the results showed that children began to use M+P+D more and more often starting from the age of two. However, children of all ages seemed to prefer the single M or P construction, followed by two-verb construction P+P or M+P, and M+P+D construction came the last. Huang hence suggested that children were prone to use one-verb constructions in conversation when encoding motion events. The frequent usage of Path led Huang to propose that Mandarin children’s motion encoding was inclined to the typology of V-languages. Her results showed that, in conversation, the language-specific patterns related to typology were

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not obvious. This contradicted to the previous studies which suggested that language-specific patterns were frequently found in children’s speech.

It seems that previous studies have shown that Mandarin-speaking children’s motion expressions collected from different genres would present different patterns.

The first difference can be found in verb token. In the previous studies of narrative data, it was suggested that Manner was more salient in children’s motion expressions. However, the study with data on natural conversation suggested that children did not prefer Manner but Path in terms of verb token. The second difference can be found in verb construction. In narration, M+P+D construction was the preferred construction, similar to the tendency of adults. Nevertheless, children preferred one-verb construction in conversation. Huang (2012) herself made some speculations to account for the different results she found between the conversational data and narrative data. First, she suggested that in natural conversation, there were less actual activities displayed in front of the speakers, while in book-reading sessions, the context of the motion was more exact with pictures provided. As a result, the difference of the visibility of motion led to the focus on different semantical components. Second, the reason that the one-verb construction was frequently found in conversation was due to economic cost in language processing.

That is to say, children might choose to produce simpler constructions to reduce the processing time in order to interact more smoothly with their interlocutors.

However, although Huang (2012) has made some comparison between the results obtained from her study using conversational data and those obtained from other studies using narrative data (Guo & Chen, 2009; Lin, 2006), it seems that her

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comparison still remains somewhat inaccurate. The first reason is that motion verb classification in her analysis and the other studies with narrative data are not consistent. In the narrative studies, Chen (2005) classified motion verbs into three categories: path verbs (including deictic path verbs and non-deictic path verbs), manner-of-motion verbs, and non-motion neutral verbs. Guo and Chen (2009) classified motion verbs into four categories: Manner verbs (including the co-event of motion: cause), Path verbs, Deictic verbs, and Neutral verbs (the verbs that “do not express any translational motion in the normal context” but “acquire the function and meaning of Manner verbs”(p. 198) ). Lin (2006) coded motion element, instead of motion verbs, into five categories: manner, path, deixis, source, and goal. On the other hand, in the conversational study, Huang (2012) classified the verbs into three verbal elements: manner verb, path verb, and deictic verb. However, in her study, Huang also combined path and deictic path together in part of her analysis for the purpose of cross-linguistic comparison. It shows that the motion verb classification in previous studies is quite inconsistent, which makes it harder to compare.

Another reason for the inaccurate comparison of Huang’s results to the results of previous studies with narrative data is that each of the studies concerned different aspects of motion expressions, resulting in the comparison to be somewhat incomplete. Some aspects, such as the analysis of verb token and verb type, were mentioned by all of the studies. However, some aspects were discussed either in the studies with conversational or narrative data, but not in both data. For instance, the analysis of the number of verb in motion constructions was discussed in Huang’s (2012) study of conversational data but was not mentioned in most of the studies

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with narrative data. Thus, a more systematic and careful comparison taking genre difference into account has not yet been done.

In order to clarify how language-specific properties affect the course of learning to describe motions in conversation and narration, the current study re-examined 3- to 5-year-old children’s motion encoding in these two genres respectively to answer the first two research question: “How do Mandarin-speaking children ages 3, 4 and 5 encode motion events in natural conversation?” and “How do Mandarin-speaking children ages 3, 4 and 5 encode motion events in elicited narration?” To summarize, the language-specific patterns of Mandarin include: 1) Verb type: the types of Manner verbs is more versatile than those of Path verbs; 2) Verb token: Manner tokens is more frequent than Path tokens; and 3) Construction:

MPD is the most common construction. Since previous studies with narrative data suggest that children’s motion expressions started to show some language-specific patterns similar to that of adults (Slobin, 1991; Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Özçaliskan

& Slobin, 1999; Allen et al., 2003; Lin, 2006; Guo & Chen, 2009; Hickmann &

Hendriks, 2010), it is expected that in Mandarin-speaking children’s motion encoding these above patterns will start to appear even in the youngest group of children in the genre of narrative.