Learning a new verb in Mandarin Chinese: The effect of affectedness condition and phonological shape
影响动词学习的两个因素: 音节和事物受影响程度
Hintat Cheung 张显达; Li Hsieh 谢莉

Abstract 摘要
This study examined the effects of affectedness and phonological shape in learning a new verb. Forty-eight Chinese children and sixteen adults were taught novel verbs, referring to an action of transferring a bag of marbles onto a box. One of the control conditions is the surface of the box: (i) remained intact or (ii) was broken by the marbles. The novel verb was presented either in a mono-syllabic form or a bi-syllabic form. Subjects’ preference in coding the novel verb's syntactic object was elicited by asking questions on the box or on the marbles. In their responses, both adults and older children coded the syntactic object of the novel verb according to the focus of the question and the semantic information. When the novel verb was presented in a mono-syllabic form, most adults and some of the older children supplied their own resultative morphemes such as 'broken' and attached it to the end of the novel verb in their answers. These results suggested that both adults and children paid attention to the aspectual properties of Chinese verbs. They considered the mono-syllabic verb an activity verb and made use of resultative morphemes to form a new compound verb. Younger children, however, displayed difficulties in this regard.

本研究探讨动词的音节以及在语境中呈现的事物受影响程度在动词学习过程中所产生的作用。在实验中，48 位小孩和16位成人个别的学习四个虚拟动词。这几个动词所指的动作是：一袋弹珠从实验者手中转移到一个盒子上面。四个词的差异是音节数（单/双音节）和盒子的表面（不变/受损）。受试者使用刚学过的虚拟词来回答有关弹珠和盒子的问题，从回答中了解他们在选择这些词的直接宾语上的偏好。结果发现，成人和年龄较大的小孩都是以问题的焦点和语境中呈现的事物受影响程度为主要考虑。在使用单音节虚拟词时，大部分的成人和部分的小孩都在虚拟词后面加上一个补语，如 ‘破’。这项结果显示受试者都注意到汉语动词在动貌上的特点。他们可能认为单音节虚拟词是个动作词 (activity verb)，所以会补充一个补语，复合成一个动补动词。

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