摘要
The issue of whether there is subject-object asymmetry in Mandarin-speaking children’s performance of head-final relative clauses (RCs) has been controversial. Hypothesizing that age may play a role in contributing to the mixed results found in the past research 011 children’s performance of RCs, we tested three groups of children of different ages (3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and 5-year-olds) with a sentence imitation experiment. Our results show that while the 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds exhibited inconsistent patterns, the 5-year-olds consistently performed subject-gap RCs better than object-gap RCs. In addition, compared with the 3-year-olds, the 4-year-olds produced fewer fragmental non-target responses, but when compared with the 5-year-olds, they made more errors of dropping the RC' marker DE. suggesting that age is critical in children’s performance of RC and age four is the transitional period. Based 0n these findings, we suggest that when children are able to imitate RC sentences stably, usually above age four, their performance of RCs exhibit clear subject-object asymmetry. Our findings imply that both developmental constraints and processing constraints associated with age should be considered when evaluating children’s performance of RCs in experiments.