An experimental study of Children’s acquisition of Mandarin recursive locatives

Abstract

Recursion is widely regarded as a defining property of human language, yet its acquisition remains uneven across domains and languages. While previous research has focused primarily on recursive possessives and prepositional phrases, recursive locative constructions in Mandarin have received relatively little attention. The present study investigates how Mandarin-speaking children aged 3–6 interpret recursive locatives, with 30 adults serving as a comparison group. A total of 127 children completed an auditory picture-comprehension task manipulating the overt realization of the functional marker de (的) across three conditions: fully overt, partially overt, and non-overt. Mixed-effects logistic regression revealed a significant positive effect of age, such that each additional month increased the likelihood of a correct hierarchical interpretation (OR = 1.023, p < .001). Crucially, this developmental effect was modulated by surface marking: age-related gains were stronger in the fully overt condition than in the partially overt and non-overt conditions, with a significant Age × Type B interaction (p = .030) and a marginal Age × Type A interaction (p = .057). Descriptively, younger children were more likely to produce conjunctive interpretations when overt marking was reduced. These findings suggest that overt morphosyntactic marking facilitates, but does not fully determine, the development of recursive locative comprehension in Mandarin.