Agent-First Bias in Children’s Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Mandarin

Abstract

The article investigates children’s agent-first bias in sentence comprehension. Agent-first bias refers to the phenomenon in which children (or adults) tend to assign the agent role to the first noun phrase (NP) in a sentence. Previous studies suggest that children acquiring Indo-European languages like English exhibit the agent-first bias from early on, while children acquiring other languages may do so only during later stages of language development. However, little is understood about whether children acquiring Mandarin, a language with distinct typological features, also exhibit the agent-first bias. To fill this gap, we conducted two studies to examine children’s thematic role assignment in Mandarin noun–verb (NV) constructions and BEI-passive constructions. In the corpus study, our analysis of the child-directed utterances showed that for NV constructions, the NPs appeared more often as agents than patients, while for BEI-passive constructions, the NPs consistently served as patients. In the experimental study, we examined how 3- to 5-year-old children comprehended the two constructions, using a picture selection task. The results were consistent with the corpus findings. More specifically, when comprehending NV constructions, children as young as age 3 exhibited the agent-first bias, and this bias was stronger in the older children and adults. By contrast, when comprehending BEI-passive constructions, the children tended to interpret the NPs as patients. Taken together, these findings indicate a developmental trajectory of the agent-first bias in Mandarin-speaking children. We discuss these findings in relation to typological features across languages as well as the potential influences of input information and the passive marker BEI on children’s thematic role assignment.