Mandarin Children’s Acquisition of Event Culmination

This paper investigates how Mandarin-speaking children acquire event culmination in causative change-of-state verbs, focusing on the contrast between resultative verb compounds (RVCs; e.g., shā-sǐ ‘kill-dead’), which entail culmination, and monomorphemic causative verbs (e.g., shā ‘kill’), which trigger a cancellable culmination inference. We provide the first acquisition study of two factors argued to license non-culminating interpretations in the adult grammar: agent control and aspectual coercion induced by time adverbials such as hǎojǐcì ‘several times’. Across three experiments, 3-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults judged perfective-marked sentences describing culminating and non-culminating events. The results revealed a clear developmental progression. Three-year-olds failed to distinguish between RVCs and monomorphemic causative verbs, accepting non-culminating interpretations for both verb classes. By contrast, 5-year-olds correctly rejected non-culminating interpretations of RVCs, demonstrating acquisition of the culmination entailment associated with these forms, but over-rejected non-culminating interpretations of monomorphemic causative verbs. Our findings suggest that the acquisition challenge posed by Mandarin causative verbs lies not only in learning the distinction between entailed vs. defeasible (i.e., cancellable) inferences, but also in the conditions under which culmination inferences may be suspended. While children are sensitive to aspectual coercion (the presence of hǎojǐcì ‘several times’ substantially increased acceptance of non-culminating interpretations across all age groups), they show little sensitivity to the distinction between agentive vs. non-agentive causation—a factor which plays a critical role in licensing non-culminating construals in the adult grammar. More broadly, this study provides new evidence on how children acquire the interaction between lexical semantics, event structure, and pragmatic inference in the domain of causative verbs.