On Mandarin-Speaking Children's Acquisition of DeP Recursion
While researchers emphatically concentrate on how children's acquisition of recursive language competence is realized,there are different opinions on the developmental path of the acquisition,primarily reflected in whether and how it grows up in stages.Based on the reanalysis of DeP with reference to the cartographic approach in the Minimalist Program,this study examines the comprehension performance of 84 Mandarin-speaking children aged 3-6 years on DeP recursion of 2-4 levels through a pointing task,responding to the previous controversies and elucidating the characteristics of how linguistic mechanism of recursion grows up.The results show that there is an exactly step-by-step development in the children's acquisition of recursion:4-year-old children successfully generate DeP recursion of 2 and 3 levels,and 5-year-old children fully master DeP recursion of level 4.Further analysis indicates that the developmental path of recursion may be universal,and the formation of the steps is attributed to the biological maturation of the recursive mechanism and the computational efficiency of the linguistic mechanism.
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