Abstract
At some point during their third year of life, Chinese-speaking children begin to produce utterances such as ‘Wode (bing-gan) bi nide (bing-gan) da’. Sometimes, they also produce some errors such as ‘Wode (bing-gan) bi nide (bing-gan) zui/hen da’. The problem of producing errors is examined by two theoretical models. The first one is on setting up rules during children’s language acquisition process. However, experimental findings cannot suffice to support the rule-based approach. Individual differences between these children show that a general rule fails to describe the process of their acquisition properly. The other account is the item-based approach that dismisses the operation of syntactic category in the early stage of grammatical development. Through observing the prior modifier clauses, there showed a close correlation with the producing of these errors. Therefore, it is suggested that these errors are not caused by an incomplete rule. Rather, they are a kind of performance in formulaic usage that comprises individual items organized around predicative terms.