Featural Relativized Minimality and Intervention Effects in Child Grammar: A Case Study of Mandarin Passives

How do young children comprehend complex sentences when intervening elements disrupt understanding?This book explores a key puzzle: children often struggle to link phrases across distance when similar phrases intervene - an "intervention effect" that sheds light on how the mind constructs grammatical structure. Using Mandarin Chinese passive sentences as a uniquely clear test case, the author integrates naturalistic speech data with carefully designed comprehension experiments involving Mandarin-speaking preschoolers.The findings reveal that children's difficulties are not merely due to memory constraints or unfamiliarity with the construction.Instead, they stem from a stricter application of a grammatical principle that also governs adult language.Importantly, only mismatches in features that are actively involved in a language's grammar - rather than any perceptible differences between phrases - help children to overcome these challenges. Drawing on evidence from languages such as He