Although Mandarin Chinese is a topic-prominent language, it is shown that young children acquiring Chinese as their first language access the concept of grammatical subject as well as that of topic. A total of 95 children aged 2-5 years acquiring Mandarin Chinese as their first language were tested on sentences involving equi-constructions. It was…

Reveals that young children acquiring Mandarin Chinese differentiate subject from topic, even though Chinese is a "topic-prominent" language. Data are based on results of a standardized, elicited imitation test of 95 Chinese children in Taiwan. Subjects between 2 years, 6 months and 5 years of age responded to coordinate as well as…

Child acquisition of Mandarin was studied with four middle class families from Taipei, Taiwan. The 2-year-olds were taped at home playing with their families. Two of the children were taped for short periods (7 hours and 9 hours), while the other two children were studied biweekly for 14 months, which resulted in 71 hours of transcribed child…

The pragmatic function of conveying given and new information is one of the most important universal communicative functions that language serves. This study investigates how Mandarin-speaking children and adults utilize surface cues of word order, marked grammatical structure, and emphatic stress to determine whether information is given or new…