Study One

Abstract

This chapter reports on experimental Study One, designed mainly to explore the role of structural complexity and internal semantic relations in the developmental trajectory of schematic idioms with Chinese young and adult speakers via two tasks: Acceptability Judgment task and Sentence Production task. Findings in Study One prove that structural complexity and internal semantic relation influenced the participants’ judgments on idiom productivity and their performance in sentence production. The simpler XAXB construction enjoyed earlier and better learning than the non-XAXB constructions; expressions with coordinate semantic relations were better learned than those with subordinate ones. Moreover, the effects of structural complexity and semantic relations were stronger with less frequent idioms and interacted with each other in sha** the learning of schematic idioms at different stages of language development.