An Empirical Study of Chinese-Speaking Children's Acquisition of Topic Constructions

[[abstract]]The present study aims to investigate semantic and syntactic features of Chinese topics, topic chains, two theoretical approaches of language acquisition, and methodological effects in Chinese-speaking children’s acquisition of topic constructions. Sixty Chinese-speaking children and twenty adult controls participated in the present experiment, and the children were divided into three groups according to their age: Group 1 (4-year-old), Group 2 (5-year-old), and Group 3 (6-year-old). The present study employed two tasks: a sentence selection task as a comprehension task and an elicited imitation task as a production task. The results showed that definiteness was easier to acquire than genericness of Chinese topics. No subjects in the present study have fully acquired the adult’s grammar in the use of generic and definite topics. A developmental gap between ages 4 and 5 was found in acquiring semantic topics. With regards to syntactic features, possessive-like topics were the easiest topic to acquire, followed by base-generated topics and moved topics. The children were found to use syntactic topics according to their own grammar. Topic chains were found difficult for the subjects. One-way ANOVA showed that all the subjects and the control group performed significantly differently (p