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A study by researchers at the Center of Theoretical Linguistics de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (CLT-UAB) analyses whether the acquisition of the first language (L1) is precipitous or is gradual in response to input frequency against the empirical domain of subject and (direct) object drop in Mandarin. Unlike Spanish or Catalan, Mandarin Chinese is considered as a discourse-oriented language, meaning that both grammatical subjects and objects may be omitted as long as their references can be retrieved from the preceding discourse context. Still, not all objects can be optionally dropped; in particular, the drop of objects in the so-called ba construction is ungrammatical in Mandarin.

Thus, at which age do the Mandarin-speaking children realize this peculiarity of their mother tongue? The answer is at one year and eight months. This answer has been confirmed from a corpus-based study of the naturalist speech of 47 Mandarin-speaking children aged one year and two months (1;2) to six years and five months (6;5) and their caregivers from the CHILDES database.

The results have been published in Journal of Child Language (accessible at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000919000114), which show that before age 1;8, all the children omitted subjects and objects in an adult-like manner, even if the presence of disambiguating evidence for this is very low. Besides, children’s ba constructions, which require an object obligatorily, included this object from the first occurrence although its frequency was scare in the input (only 3.1% in adult speech).

Taking into account the evidence, the authors suggest that the acquisition of L1, at least for certain structures, occurs early independently of the input (against the claims of Yang, 2002, 2004). Of course, this does not exclude the role of frequency in language acquisition, as has been highlighted by the authors in the article. Rather, it provides a reconsideration of the role of input in language acquisition, which indicates children are not simply accelerating (or delaying) the acquisition of certain structures based on what appears more (or less) frequently in their input.