Learning two syntactic constructions simultaneously: a case of overshadowing

Overshadowing refers to the reduced learning or expression of the association between a weaker cue and an outcome in the presence of another stronger cue. The present study broadens the scope of investigation in second language acquisition (SLA), which has mainly focused on inflectional morphology, by extending it to learning two Chinese syntactic constructions, namely the Ba-construction and its SVO counterpart. Thirty L2 Chinese learners were first exposed to the target constructions via watching videos, and were then tested for comprehension and production. The results were three-fold: first and foremost, they yielded evidence of syntactic overshadowing of the Ba-construction by its SVO counterpart, resulting in the reduction of the quantity and quality of the Ba production; second, since the form–meaning mapping was successful for both the Ba and SVO construction, the syntactic overshadowing is more likely to be an expression deficit; and third, the pre-knowledge of verbs further confined the use of the Ba-construction, suggesting a moderating role of word entrenchment in L2 syntactic learning. These findings not only deepen our understanding of overshadowing at the syntactic level, but also offer a fresh perspective for addressing the challenges of L2 learning of the Chinese Ba-construction.

A Corpus-Based Study on the Pragmatic Use of the ba Construction in Early Childhood Mandarin Chinese

This article reports on an inquiry that investigated the development of ba constructions in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of ba construction were extracted from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus collected from 168 preschoolers aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6 (year; month; Li and Tse, 2011). Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus, University of Hong Kong. Data analysis indicated that: (1) Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 11 types of ba construction, and the children in the youngest age group (age 2;6) were able to produce six types of them; (2) children at 4 years old (age 4;6) experienced a critical developmental period of pragmatic use, and at 5 years old (age 5;6) they had attained cognitive and linguistic maturity in understanding the semantic and syntactic features of ba constructions; and (3) there was a significant age effect on the production of three types of ba construction, but no significant association between the children’s gender and their production of ba constructions. These findings offer fresh insights into understanding Chinese children’s innate capacity to understand the co-occurrence constraints concerning the syntactic, semantic and verb features inherent in ba construction, and their developmental ability to denote telic events by resorting to the appropriate ba sentence patterns.