Documenting the language abilities of ‘left-behind’ ethnic minority children inChina: evidence from Kam-Mandarin bilingual children’s comprehension ofrelative clauses
Wenchun Yang1, Angel Chan1, Evan Kidd2
12

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen

According to the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (2017), there are morethan 15 million of so-called ‘left-behind’ children in China, who are primarily taken care of by
their grandparents instead of their parents. ‘Left-behind’ children refer to those who are left inrural areas while their parents work in urban regions. Thus far, there is very little publishedresearch documenting the learner language characteristics of this unique group of children.
Studying their language development allows us to address important issues in child language
acquisition, for instance, how variations in culture and language affect language development inchildren.
We present the first experimental study investigating the comprehension of relative clauses (RCs)in Kam-Mandarin bilingual children. Forty-two children aged 5;11-10;3 from a minority Kamvillage in Mainland China were tested on their comprehension of head-final subject and object
RCs in both Kam (L1) and Mandarin (L2) with a picture-pointing task.
The children in general showed a subject over object preference in both languages, a patternconsistent with the existing literature on bi- and tri- lingual Mandarin-speaking children. Thesechildren found object head-final RCs in Kam significantly more difficult than those in Mandarin,even though Kam was their first language and the stronger language for the younger group.
Children’s knowledge of Mandarin (measured by their Mandarin vocabulary scores) positively
predicted their accuracy in comprehending Kam object head-final RCs, and negatively predicted
their error rates when comprehending Kam object head-final RCs. We therefore argue for a
specific case of backward L2-to-L1 positive transfer in the younger group of bilinguals, despite
Kam being their stronger language.
This study is empirically and theoretically significant. Empirically, it features an under-studied
language, Kam, which not only attests the typologically rare combination of SVO canonical word
order and head-final RCs, but also instantiates both head-final RCs and head-initial RCs.
Theoretically, these word order properties bear on the theme of competition between constructions(Chan, Chen, Matthews & Yip, 2017; Kidd, Chan & Chiu, 2015; Rowland, Noble & Chan, 2014).
We will also address the following conceptual issues: (i) the issue of subject/object asymmetry inlanguages attesting the rare combination of SVO order and head-final RCs; (ii) the nature ofdifficulty in comprehending object RCs in Kam versus Mandarin; and (iii) the possibility, natureand directionality of cross-linguistic influence in these bilingual children, given the structural
overlaps (Hulk & Müller, 2000).

Selected example stimuli:
Mandarin
Kam

Subject RCnayi ge shi [qin gongji de laoshu] ?
‘Which one is [the mouse that is kissing the cock]?’tɕjanəu ɕi: [pu kaɪ lino:]?
‘Which one is [the mouse that is kissing the cock]?’Object RCnayi ge shi [laoshu tuidexiaoya] ?
‘Which one is [the duck that the mouse is pushing]?’tɕja nəuɕi: [meu wa lipən]?
‘Which one is [the duck that the cat is feeding]?’

Selected references:Chan, A., Chen, S., Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (2017). Comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in a trilingualacquisition context. Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01641
Hulk, A., and Müller, N. (2000). Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3, 227–244.
Kidd, E., Chan, A., & Chiu, J. (2015). Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children's
comprehension of relative clauses. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(3), 438-452.
Rowland, C., Noble, C. & Chan, A. (2014). Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence
meaning. In B. MacWhinney, A. Malchukov & E. A. Moravcsik (eds), Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage(pp.127-143). Oxford University Press.