| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 語言學研究所 === 94 === The purpose of the present study is to investigate whether the children between two to five years old behave in a rule-based way or in an item-based way in the acquisition of the bei-construction in Mandarin Chinese. Two experiments, i.e., the elicited production task and the comprehension task, are conducted to explore the children’s production and comprehension of the bei-construction and then the results are compared to adults’ as well. In these two tasks, the four novel verbs are employed in order to prevent the children from imitating others’ speech. Our results are provided as follows: (1) The more novel verbs which are produced in the bei-sentences the children can remember, the older the children are. (2) The more full bei-sentences the children tend to employ, the older the children are. (3) The children at 2;8 tend to produce the nontaught bei-sentences in a rule-based way. (4) In production, the performance of Group 3 (4;7) is much better than that of Group 1 (2;8) and the performance of Group 3 tends to behave in a more adult-like way. (5) The children at 2;8 tend to comprehend the nontaught full bei-sentences in a rule-based way. (6) The performance of all children examined in the present study is not as good as that of the adults not only in production but also in their comprehension. It indicates that the children’s production and comprehension in the bei-construction are not mature enough compared to the adults’ to deal with the bei-construction in question. Based on our results above, we infer that the children not only above three years old but also under three years old acquire the bei-construction in a rule-based way, not in an item-based (piecemeal) fashion and their linguistic competence develops gradually toward adult-like performance.
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