The multimodal expression of causal events by children in Mandarin Chinese and English
Authors:   , Niu Chenxi 
Published: September 2024

Causal events, events that consist of cause and result, are commonly experienced in people’s life, and different languages have different structures available to express cause and result. Despite contrasting features from one language to another, languages show similar patterns when it comes to encoding the cause and result in a causal event. Languages that use the same syntactic structures are regarded as typologically the same in this regard. For instance, in a language like English, cause is typically encoded in a verb whereas result is encoded in a particle related to the verb. In comparison, in languages like Mandarin Chinese, cause and result are typically represented by two separate verbs.

Earlier studies have shown that children learning languages that are typologically the same follow similar paths of acquiring related structures, whereas children learning typologically different languages followed different developmental paths. However, this field of research leaves many areas less well understood, including:
(1) How do children (between age 4 and 7) who learn Mandarin or English express causal events verbally?
(2) Do children learning these two languages show different developmental paths? If so, how is that related to the typological features of the two languages?
(3) How do children express causal events using depictive means, such as sound-mimicking words and representational gestures, that can iconically represent the meaning ?

This thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the objectives of this study. Chapter 2 reviews the literature in the areas of causal events, cross-linguistic differences, and language multimodality. Chapter 3 focuses on Mandarin Chinese, an Equipollently-framed language which features a heavy use of contextual clauses. It explores how sentence structures and gestures are used by Chinese-learning children in their event expressions. In addition, it also investigates speakers' use of contextual clauses. Chapter 4 examines multimodal language development among child learners of English, a Satellite-framed language. Based on the prior arguments that English shows different typological features depending on the types of causal events, this chapter distinguishes caused motion events and caused changes of state. It finds that English speakers are more likely to use single-clause structures to encode caused changes of state. Chapter 5 compares how children learning Chinese and English use causative expressions. It finds that four-year-old English learners already use causative structures like adults do, while Chinese learners don't reach this stage until around age six. Chapter 6 examines how children learning Chinese and English use sound symbolic words (SSW) to express causation and results. While SSWs vary across languages, Chinese learners use them more frequently than English learners, though both groups tend to depict causes rather than results using SSWs. Chapter 7 summarizes the main findings and discusses them in relation to language typology and shared developmental patterns.

Overall, this study informs the field with detailed and comparable evidence from Chinese and English speakers. The data showing children’s expressions of causal events are also available on the OSF platform for future research.