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.

中文翻译：

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儿童使用非规范句子结构困难的根源：来自普通话的见解


本研究调查了儿童对非规范结构的困难是由于他们不像成人那样使用语言线索，还是由于他们无法使用迟到的线索来修改误解。我们采用了一项启动制作任务和一项带有图片验证的自定进度听力任务，并包括三个具有不同词序和存在或不存在形态句法线索的普通话非规范结构。对 45 至 10 岁讲普通话的儿童进行了测试，并与成人进行了比较。结果表明，儿童在实时使用不同线索方面与成人没有区别，尽管他们在离线理解和生产方面的表现更容易出错，但随着年龄的增长而有所改善。这些结果表明，当前儿童样本具有类似成人的提示使用模式，并使用迟到的提示来修正误解。相对于成年人，观察到的离线准确性和生产困难较差是由于他们在执行任务时的一般领域能力不发达。