Sources of children’s difficulties with non-canonical sentence structures: Insights from Mandarin

The present study investigated whether children's difficulty with non-canonical structures is due to their non-adult-like use of linguistic cues or their inability to revise misinterpretations using late-arriving cues. We adopted a priming production task and a self-paced listening task with picture verification, and included three Mandarin non-canonical structures with differing word orders and the presence or absence of morphosyntactic cues. Forty five-to-ten-year-old Mandarin-speaking children were tested and compared to adults. Results showed that children were indistinguishable from adults in how they used different cues in real-time, although their performance in offline comprehension and production was more prone to errors but improved given the increase of age. These results suggest that the current child sample has adult-like cue-use patterns and use late-arriving cues to revise misinterpretations. The observed worse offline accuracy and production difficulties relative to adults result from their less developed domain-general abilities in performing tasks.