The Acquisition of Word Order in a Topic-prominent Language: Corpus Findings and Experimental Investigation

It is well-known that Chinese has SVO as predominant word order, with variant orders OSV and SOV marking topic and focus, intimately linked to the topic-prominence of the language. Assuming early setting of the head parameter in syntactic acquisition and the peripheral positions of topic and focus in clausal structure, one might hypothesize that Chinese-speaking children will acquire the predominant SVO order early, but develop the variant orders later. Such acquisition findings, if true, would seemingly go against the idea of a topic prominence parameter. This paper explores the development of topic prominence by examining word order in early child Chinese, based on naturalistic longitudinal corpora as well as cross-sectional experiments that investigated the relative accessibility of different word orders.