Uniform Acquisitional Path for Linguistic Recursion

Abstract

While children’s acquisition of recursion has drawn extensive attention in the field, there is less research offering proper evidence for the uniform developmental path of linguistic recursion. To address this issue cross-linguistically, this study examines how 84 Mandarin-speaking children aged between three and six comprehend two to four-level DeP recursion through a pointing task. The results reveal that two and three-level DeP recursion is successfully generated by four-year-old children first, and then five-year-old children fully master four-level DeP recursion. The findings are consistent with the developmental route-map of Japanese children’s acquisition of recursive possessives. Meanwhile, the analysis shows that the biological maturation of the recursive mechanism and the enhancement of computational efficiency of the linguistic mechanism mainly account for the step-by-step development.