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. 2025 May 17;15(1):17157.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-01096-x.

Early acquisition of complex syntax in Mandarin-speaking infants

Jingtao Zhu  1   2 , Anna Gavarró  3
Affiliations

Early acquisition of complex syntax in Mandarin-speaking infants

Jingtao Zhu et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Although Mandarin is an S(ubject)V(erb)O(bject) language, other non-canonical sentences with the object marker ba are also possible, yet their comprehension in child Mandarin is underexplored. This study uses eye-tracking and the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, as well as the use of pseudo-verbs, to explore how 24 Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.5 months) and 48 adults process these structures. The results of our experiments show that both infants and adults looked longer at the target scenes for the three grammatical sentence types tested: SVO, SbaOV and O, SbaOV. While comprehension of SVO and SbaOV could be achieved with an AGENT-first parsing strategy, the fact that PATIENT-first O, SbaOV constructions were also parsed by infants suggests access to grammatical, language-specific knowledge.

Keywords: Ba construction; agent-first; Early development; Grammatical knowledge; Mandarin Chinese; Non-canonical word orders.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Materials corresponding to (9b) and (9c), taken from Tobii Studio™ (v3.4.8) by the first author. The rectangles indicate the Regions of Interest (ROI) used in our measures.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Timeline of the experiment.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Proportion of looking time to the target video during the four temporal windows in the three conditions with standard error shading (infants).
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Proportion of looking time to the target video during the four windows in the three conditions and standard error shading (adults).
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Proportion of looking time to the target video in the four critical temporal windows in SVO and O, SbaOV conditions in broad focus context (experiment 2) and O, SbaOV in narrow focus context (follow-up experiment) (adults).
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Intonational pattern of the test SbaOV sentence Xiao-tu-zi ba xiao-ya-zi tuān le.
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Intonational pattern of the ungrammatical sentence Xiao-lv xiao-gou nui-le (from Zhu et al.: pp.67).
Fig. 8
Fig. 8
Intonational pattern of the test O, SbaOV sentence Xiao-yang, xiao-ma ba ta tuān le. P represents pause.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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