| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 97 === The present study aims to investigate Chinese children’s acquisition of double object verbs with gei. These verbs were classified into three types, gei-required, gei-forbidden, and gei-optional. The following issues were examined, i.e. the difficulty levels, unmarked/marked patterns, development of untargeted patterns, age effects, and task effects. Two tasks were employed, a grammaticality task, i.e. Sticker Giving Task (SG Task), and a sentence elicitation task, i.e. Picture Description Task (PD Task). Forty-five children aged from three to five and fifteen adults participated in the experiment, who were further divided into four groups, i.e. Group 1 (three-year-olds), Group 2 (four-year-olds), Group 3 (five-year-olds), and Group 4 (native controls).
The results are as follows: Firstly, among the three types, gei-forbidden verbs posed the most difficulty for the children, while the other two were relatively easier. Secondly, with regard to gei-required verbs, [V-DO-gei-IO] was the unmarked pattern while [V-gei-IO-DO] was marked. Similarly, for gei-optional verbs, the most unmarked pattern was [V-DO-gei-IO], followed by [V-IO-DO], and [V-gei-IO-DO] the most marked. Thirdly, a steady development was found in the children’s untargeted sentences. The children began with mono-transitive use of these verbs, then added a second object, and finally generated more complex sentences. Fourthly, age, as expected, turned out to be a crucial factor affecting our children’s performances. It was confirmed that the older they were, the better they performed. Finally, a task effect was found: the SG Task was significantly easier than the PD Task, a result consistent with the previous studies that comprehension was easier and earlier than production.
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