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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - What makes a complement false?
T2 - Looking at the effects of verbal semantics and perspective in Mandarin children’s interpretation of complement-clause constructions and their false-belief understanding
AU - Brandt, Silke
AU - Li, Honglan
AU - Chan, Angel
PY - 2023/2/23
Y1 - 2023/2/23
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
U2 - 10.1515/cog-2021-0108
DO - 10.1515/cog-2021-0108
M3 - Journal article
VL - 34
SP - 99
EP - 132
JO - Cognitive Linguistics
JF - Cognitive Linguistics
SN - 0936-5907
IS - 1
ER -