Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In light of the studies that investigate when and how English-speaking young children exhibit adult-like abstractionof syntax, this study explores these issues by examining Mandarin-speaking preschoolers ranging from 2- to 5-year-olds’comprehension of the Mandarin SVO-, ba-, long-passive, and short-passive constructions using the forced-choice pointingparadigm. The results indicated that at the age of 2, Mandarin preschoolers exhibited abstraction of syntax in these fourconstructions. These results went against the predictions of accounts derived from the structure mapping account and from thecompetition model. Instead, Mandarin ba- (used in the ba-construction) and bei-markers (used in the long- and short-passiveconstructions) play an important role in Mandarin-speaking young children’s demonstrations of abstraction of syntax.