Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of telicity, focusing on how they utilize resultative verb compounds and completive particles as unique syntactic mechanisms that independently encode event delimitedness. The study addresses two core questions: (1) the developmental trajectory of children’s recognition of result complements as telicity markers, and (2) their ability to differentiate completive particles from bare verbs in encoding event boundaries. By employing a stratified age design (6-9 years) and controlled picture-selection tasks, the research probes the syntax-semantics interface under a typologically unique verb-framed encoding system, with implications for universalist versus parametric accounts of telicity. Beyond linguistics, the findings illuminate broader cognitive mechanisms in event representation, testing how children’s telicity judgments are driven by perceptual cues (e.g. visible state changes) or abstract syntactic knowledge. The results reveal how language-specific structures interact with domain-general cognitive biases during middle childhood, a pivotal period for metalinguistic and conceptual development of event structure.
Authors: Yihang Zhong, Qi’ao Yang, Xiang Meng, Zhizhong Tian
Institution: Chinese University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4413128696