What makes a complement false? : Looking at the effects of verbal semantics and perspective in Mandarin children’s interpretation of complement-clause constructions and their false-belief understanding

Brandt, Silke and Li, Honglan and Chan, Angel (2023) What makes a complement false? : Looking at the effects of verbal semantics and perspective in Mandarin children’s interpretation of complement-clause constructions and their false-belief understanding. Cognitive Linguistics, 34 (1). pp. 99-132. ISSN 0936-5907

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Abstract

Research focusing on Anglo-European languages indicates that children’s acquisition of the subordinate structure of complement-clause constructions and the semantics of mental verbs facilitates their understanding of false belief, and that the two linguistic factors interact. Complement-clause constructions support false-belief development, but only when used with realis mental verbs like ‘think’ in the matrix clause (de Villiers, 2007). In Chinese, however, only the semantics of mental verbs seems to play a facilitative role in false-belief development (Cheung et al. 2009). We argue that these cross-linguistic differences can be explained by variations in availability and usage patterns of mental verbs and complement-clause constructions across languages. Unlike English, Mandarin-Chinese has a verb that indicates that a belief might be false: yi3wei2 ‘(falsely) think’. Our corpus analysis suggests that, unlike English caregivers, Mandarin-Chinese caregivers do not produce frequent, potentially unanalyzed, chunks with mental verbs and first-person subjects, such as ‘I think’. In an experiment, we found that the comprehension of complement-clause constructions used with yi3wei2 ‘(falsely) think’, but not with jue2de2 ‘think’, predicted Mandarin children’s false-belief understanding between the ages of 4 and 5. In contrast to English, whether mental verbs were used with first- or third-person subjects did not affect their correlation with false-belief understanding.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Cognitive Linguistics
Uncontrolled Keywords:
Research Output Funding/no_not_funded
Subjects:
?? no - not fundedlinguistics and languagedevelopmental and educational psychology ??
ID Code:
184199
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
16 Jan 2023 16:30
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
26 Feb 2024 00:47