Investigating bei2 constructions in Cantonese-speaking children using sentence recall

Abstract

The study investigated the development of bei2 constructions in Cantonese-speaking children. Fifty-eight children (27 boys and 31 girls) ranging from 2;05 to 4;02 (year; month) were recruited from four kindergartens. They were in three groups: the youngest (2;05-2;11), the middle (3;0-3;07) and the oldest group (3;08-4;02). They participated in a sentence recall task involving three types of bei2 constructions, namely the permissive, the dative and the passive. Generally speaking, older children performed better than younger children in the different bei2 constructions. Besides, children were the least accurate in the production of the passive construction while their performance in the permissive and the dative was similar. Diverse error patterns were observed in different age groups and construction types. Most children in the youngest and the middle group simplified the syntactic structures. In the oldest group, this error type became less frequent but they were not able to make a distinction between the lexical and the grammatical function of the bei2 form. Comparing across construction types, simplification of structures was the major error in the permissive and the dative construction. In the passive construction, errors in the aspect marker were frequently observed, suggesting difficulty in understanding the grammatical function of bei2 as an agent marker.