The Syntax-Semantics Interface in a Child's Path: A Study of 3- to 11-Year-Olds' Elicited Production of Mandarin Recursive Relative Clauses.

The generative literature presents diverse viewpoints on the relationship between children's syntax acquisition and semantics acquisition. This study explored the issue by examining Mandarin-speaking children's production of recursive relative clauses under different semantic conditions. A 4 (syntactic types) × 2 (semantic conditions) × 10 (age) design was utilized. The syntactic types include: subject-gapped relative clauses within object-gapped relative clauses, object-gapped relative clauses within object-gapped relative clauses, object-gapped relative clauses within subject-gapped relative clauses, and subject-gapped relative clauses within subject-gapped relative clauses. Each syntactic type was tested under both irreversible and reversible internal semantics (IIS and RIS, respectively). Participants were exposed to speech-visual stimuli providing specific irreversible external semantics (IES). The study included 359 Mandarin-speaking children aged 3 to 11, along with 80 adult controls. The results show that children produced the four types of recursive relative clauses in the IIS-IES condition 1 to 3 years earlier than those in the RIS-IES condition. Our findings support a refined syntax-semantics interface theory, involving a two-stage developmental path in language acquisition: The language acquisition device starts with a syntax-IIS interface and progresses to a syntax-IES interface.