汉语学龄前儿童主、宾关系从句认知特点及语义因素效应的研究

关系从句是人类语言领域句法结构较为复杂的句式，汉语3～5岁儿童是否具有加工关系从句的认知能力，以及该能力是否受句法结构和语义因素的影响，成为该领域当前研究的热点。本研究选取120名3～6岁学龄前儿童，以汉语主、宾关系从句为研究材料，通过操纵从句中核心名词的生命性格局对上述问题进行了考察。结果显示：(1)汉语领域内，3～4岁儿童基本上具备了理解句式较为简单的关系从句的能力；(2)5～6岁左右的儿童基本上具备了利用语义因素辅助关系从句加工的能力。总之，汉语学龄前儿童具备了加工关系从句的认知能力，且高年级儿童可以利用语义因素辅助从句加工。

A Study about Chinese Relative Clause Processing and the Effects of Animacy for Preschool Children

One of the important tasks in psycholinguistic literature is to explore the innate mechanisms and the universal principles guiding parsing in sentence processing. To explore whether 3~6 years old children have the ability to utilize semantic cues in comprehension of relative clauses or not, 120 children were recruited in the study. The study employed a 2×2×3 mixed design, with RC type (SRC vs.ORC), the configuration of animacy of the head nouns (animaicy-inanimacy vs. inanimacy-animacy) as within-subject factors, and grade (one vs. two vs. three) as between-subject factors. The data were addressed using general logistic mixed effect regression model (GLMER) and the results indicated that the main effect of grade was significant, but no significant differences were found for type of sentences and animacy of the head nouns. There were significant interactions between type of sentence and grades, simple analyses showed that no significances were found between SRCs and ORCs for grade 1 and grade 2, but for grade 3, there were significant differences between SRCs and ORCs. The three-way sentence×grade×animacy interactions were marginal significant. For children from grade 3, sentences with inanimacy-animacy configuration were more difficult to process than sentences with animacy-inanimacy configuration under conditions of ORCs, but under conditions of SRCs, sentences with inanimacy-animacy configuration were easier to comprehend than sentences with animacy-inanimacy configuration. Under conditions of inanimacy-animacy configuration, children from grade 1 have more difficult in comprehending SRCs compared to children from grade 2 and 3, but no significant differences were found between grade 2 and 3. On the other hand, under conditions of animacy-inanimacyconfiguration, no significant differences were found in comprehending ORCs between grade 1 and grade 2, but their accuracy was lower than children from grade 3.In conclusion, this paper firstly found that 3~4 years old children from China have the ability to comprehend RCs with simple structure, but until about 6 years old, they could utilize the semantic cues in comprehension of RCs.