Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese by Early-Stage Immersion Learners: A Case Study

Abstract

To date there have not been many studies that examine how Mandarin is acquired in an immersion setting. In this study we examine how early-stage immersion learners of Mandarin acquire a grammatical structure— the ba construction. This is a frequently used structure in Mandarin that has a non-canonical SOV word order, an order for which English has no counterpart. Taking a qualitative approach, we collected learner utterances over a 4-month period. It was found that the learners did not like to deviate from the canonical SVO word order and it was difficult for them to produce the ba construction. However, when they did use the construction, their utterances satisfied a complex predicate constraint that is imposed on the construction, suggesting that the learners have knowledge of the constraint. Above all, immersion young learners have a grammar of their own. Their language development offers a new window into bilingual language acquisition.

Keywords

• immersion
• acquisition of mandarin chinese
• early-stage learners
• ba construction