Aspect In Telicity Acquisition: Evidence From Mandarin Children

Aspect In Telicity Acquisition: Evidence From Mandarin Children | Authorea try { document.documentElement.classList.add('js'); } catch (e) { } var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'G-8VDV14Y67G']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Skip to main content Preprints Collections Wiley Open Research IET Open Research Ecological Society of Japan All Collections About About Authorea FAQs Contact Us Quick Search anywhere Search for preprint articles, keywords, etc. Search Search ADVANCED SEARCH SCROLL This is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed. Data may be preliminary. 12 August 2025 V1 Latest version Share on Aspect In Telicity Acquisition: Evidence From Mandarin Children Authors : Yihang Zhong 0000-0003-4206-3686 [email protected] , Qi’ao Yang , Xiang Meng , and Zhizhong Tian Authors Info & Affiliations https://doi.org/10.22541/au.175502883.35424339/v1 256 views 97 downloads Contents Abstract Aspect In Telicity Acquisition: Evidence From Mandarin Children 1.3 Child acquisition of telicity 2. The Present Study 3. Methodology 3.3 Procedure 3.4 Data analysis References Information & Authors Metrics & Citations View Options References Figures Tables Media Share Abstract This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of telicity, focusing on how they utilize resultative verb compounds and completive particles as unique syntactic mechanisms that independently encode event delimitedness. The study addresses two core questions: (1) the developmental trajectory of children’s recognition of result complements as telicity markers, and (2) their ability to differentiate completive particles from bare verbs in encoding event boundaries. By employing a stratified age design (6-9 years) and controlled picture-selection tasks, the research probes the syntax-semantics interface under a typologically unique verb-framed encoding system, with implications for universalist versus parametric accounts of telicity. Beyond linguistics, the findings illuminate broader cognitive mechanisms in event representation, testing how children’s telicity judgments are driven by perceptual cues (e.g. visible state changes) or abstract syntactic knowledge. The results reveal how language-specific structures interact with domain-general cognitive biases during middle childhood, a pivotal period for metalinguistic and conceptual development of event structure. Aspect In Telicity Acquisition: Evidence From Mandarin Children Highlights • To investigate Mandarin children’s acquisition of telicity through resultative verb compounds and completive particles, revealing unique syntactic-semantic mapping strategies. • To demonstrate children’s developmental trajectory in distinguishing telic markers (6–9 years) and may highlight early reliance on perceptual cues over abstract syntax. • To challenge universal quantization-based accounts of telicity and support verb-framed encoding models like Ramchand’s (2008) First Phase Syntax. • To illuminate cognitive-linguistic interplay in event representation, showing how language-specific structures shape children’s understanding of event boundaries. Abstract This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of telicity, focusing on how they utilize resultative verb compounds and completive particles as unique syntactic mechanisms that independently encode event delimitedness. The study addresses two core questions: (1) the developmental trajectory of children’s recognition of result complements as telicity markers, and (2) their ability to differentiate completive particles from bare verbs in encoding event boundaries. By employing a stratified age design (6-9 years) and controlled picture-selection tasks, the research probes the syntax-semantics interface under a typologically unique verb-framed encoding system, with implications for universalist versus parametric accounts of telicity. Beyond linguistics, the findings illuminate broader cognitive mechanisms in event representation, testing how children’s telicity judgments are driven by perceptual cues (e.g. visible state changes) or abstract syntactic knowledge. The results reveal how language-specific structures interact with domain-general cognitive biases during middle childhood, a pivotal period for metalinguistic and conceptual development of event structure. Keywords: telicity, child acquisition of event structure, syntax-semantics interface 1. Introduction 1.1 Aspect in telicity Aspect refers to temporal features of events, such as continuity and repeatability (Smith, 1997). Vendler’s (2019) categorization of verbs according to their aspectual features includes stative verbs, (static and continuous status, like know , love ), activity verbs (continuous action without a natural end, like walk , ride ), accomplishment verbs (continuous action with a natural end, like build , eat ), and achievement verbs (action with a single moment and a natural end, like reach , end ). Among these categories, accomplishment verbs and achievement verbs are telic verbs as their denoted events all have a natural end, namely the goal of event development. Activity verbs are atelic as their denoted events lack a natural end. Stative verbs do not have the feature of telicity as they do not indicate processes going on in time. One testing method to differentiate telic and atelic verbs is to insert an adverbial phrase guided by in or for . (1) shows that an in -guided adverbial phrase is compatible with a telic verb; (2) shows that a for -guided adverbial phrase is compatible with an atelic verb. (1) The match will begin in/*for 5 minutes. (2) John walked for/*in an hour. Tenny’s (1994) aspectual interface hypothesis proposes that the universal mapping principle between thematic structure and argument structure is constrained by aspectual features. The constraints upon aspectual features linked to external and internal arguments restrict the kinds of event participants that can appear in these positions. Only aspectual features from thematic structures are visible parts of the universal mapping principle. Tenny argues that the semantic domain of the syntax-semantics interface is determined by a set of aspectual features related to delimitedness; the syntactic domain of the interface is determined by external, internal direct, and internal indirect arguments as three argument types. There are three mapping rules linking aspectual features to argument types: a measuring-out constraint on an internal direct argument, a terminus constraint on an internal indirect argument, and a non-measuring constraint on an external argument. Only aspectual features play a decisive role in mapping semantics to syntax. Internal direct arguments are key to aspectual structures as only direct arguments can “measure” events represented by verbs. “Measurement” refers to the temporal terminus of an event marked by an argument. It consists of a measurement scale associated with an argument and temporal delimitedness. Delimitedness is a necessary but insufficient condition for measurement. Verbs capable of measuring objects can be divided into incremental theme verbs, change-of-state verbs, and route verbs. Among them, incremental theme verbs may denote consumption (e.g. eat , drink ) and creation (e.g. build , write ) (Krifka, 1992). Their internal direct argument is an incremental theme. The change in incremental theme is proportional to event-related progression. (3) shows that the event eat progresses through the internal argument an apple . The degree to which an apple is consumed reflects the progression of eat as an event. Once an apple is fully consumed, the event finishes. Hence, an apple is a measurement scale and delimits the event. (3) I eat an apple. (4) I eat an apple to the core. Many verbs are ambiguous about delimitedness. (5) and (6) can both insert an in -guided adverbial phrase or a for -guided adverbial phrase, which suggests that the telicity feature of walk and climb as route verbs is indeterminate. (5) I walked the trail in an hour/for an hour. (6) I climbed the ladder in an hour/for an hour. When both instances insert an internal indirect argument (goal phrase), the events are definitely bound, like (7) and (8). Both to its end and to the top denote terminus, specifying delimitedness. The phrases the trail and the ladder are route objects, which, unlike incremental themes that both measure and delimit events, must be used in conjunction with a respective goal phrase that indicates terminus. For incremental theme verbs, if a VP already has a direct internal argument that measures an event, the addition of a goal argument, only serves to further crystallize the event-related terminus, like (4). This is because an internal direct argument already provides a terminus. The route argument of a route verb is different from the measurement scale argument of an incremental theme verb. A measurement scale has an intrinsic terminus; a route terminus must be found outside an internal direct argument, namely a goal phrase as an internal indirect argument. (7) I walked the trail to its end in an hour/*for an hour. (8) I climbed the ladder to the top in an hour/*for an hour. Cross-linguistically, telicity is primarily determined through two syntactic mechanisms: the quantization of an object argument and the presence of an overt resultative phrase (ResP). Languages like Russian and Polish further morphologically mark telicity through perfective prefixes, which directly merge with an aspectual phrase (AspQ) to assign telicity (Borer, 2005; Svenonius, 2005). For instance, in the Russian morpheme vy-pit’ butylku vina ‘to drink up a bottle of wine’, the prefix vy- is the phonological realization of AspQ. It directly merges with the AspQ head, assigning a quantized interpretation to the event and forcing the object ( butylku ‘a bottle’) to be interpreted as quantized (e.g. ‘the whole bottle’). This process does not involve overt syntactic movement because the prefix inherently carries a [+Quan] feature, acts as a quantificational operator, and is lexically associated with AspQ. However, languages diverge in their reliance on these mechanisms. Slavic languages prioritize morphological marking, while English depends more on object quantization and resultatives. The Exo-Skeletal Model (Borer, 2005) attributes telicity to the syntactic assignment of quantificational features to AspQ. In contrast, the First Phase Syntax (Ramchand, 2008) emphasizes the role of resultative syntactic heads in delimiting events. These models highlight the interplay between universal principles (e.g. quantization) and parametric variation (e.g. morphological richness) in telicity encoding. 1.2 Telicity encoding in Mandarin Chinese Mandarin Chinese presents a unique case in the syntactic and semantic encoding of telicity, diverging significantly from both Slavic languages (which rely on morphological prefixes) and English (where object quantization plays a central role). Instead of depending on nominal quantization or inflectional morphology, Mandarin primarily employs two distinct but related strategies: resultative verb compounds and completive particles (Wang, 2024). These mechanisms operate independently of object quantization, allowing for a more flexible interaction between verb semantics, event structure, and syntactic composition, particularly challenging the universality of quantization-based accounts. One of the most salient features of Mandarin telicity is the role of resultative verb compounds, which consist of a main verb followed by a secondary predicate indicating the resultative state. The construction explicitly encodes the endpoint of an event, overriding the atelic nature of activity verbs. In (9), the resultative verb compound imposes a telic reading, despite the object 衣服 ‘the clothes’ being a bare noun with no inherent quantization. This phenomenon contrasts sharply with English, where a quantized object (e.g. ‘the clothes’) would typically be required for a telic interpretation. Crucially, a resultative verb compound does not necessarily confer definiteness or specificity to an object, meaning that even non-referential nouns can appear in telic events (Hu, 2018). Thus, Mandarin relies more heavily on lexical-semantic composition (i.e. the verb-result pairing) rather than syntactic quantization to determine telicity. (9) 娜娜 在 三分钟 内 洗 干净 衣服 nà nà zài sān fēn zhōng nèi xǐ gān jìng yī fu Nana in 3-minute in wash clean clothes ‘Nana washed the clothes clean in three minutes.’ (Wang, 2024) A second key mechanism is the use of completive particles, such as 完 /wán/, 掉 /diào/, 到 /dào/, 好/ hǎo/, and 住 /zhù/. Unlike Slavic perfective prefixes, these particles do not carry quantificational force and instead grammaticalize mere event completion without implying a change of state. In (10), the particle 完 signals that the event reached its endpoint, but the object 饼干 ‘biscuits’ remains non-quantized—there is no requirement that all biscuits are consumed. Completive particles differ from resultative verb compounds that entail an actual result state. The optionality of object quantization in Mandarin telic constructions poses a challenge to theories like Borer’s (2005) Exo-Skeletal Model, which assumes that telicity must correlate with object quantization. Instead, Mandarin suggests that event delimitation can be achieved purely through functional morphology (particles) or lexical compounding, independent of nominal reference. (10) 弟弟 吃完 饼干 dìdi chī wán bǐnggān brother eat-COMPL biscuit ‘The younger brother finished eating biscuits.’ A further complication arises with accomplishment verbs (e.g. 吃 ‘eat’), which in Mandarin exhibit aspectual variability even with quantized objects. (11) is often assumed to be telic, but it can also permit atelic interpretations, as “the boy could eat an apple and may not finish eating it”. This ambiguity suggests that Mandarin does not treat object quantization as a strict determinant of telicity, unlike English or Slavic languages. Instead, the primary cue for telicity is the presence of an explicit result phrase (resultative verb compounds or completive particle), while bare quantized objects may or may not enforce a bounded event interpretation. (11) 男孩 吃了 一个 苹果 nán hái chī le yī ge píng guǒ boy eat-PFV CL biscuit ‘The boy ate an apple.’ Theoretical implications of these findings are significant. While the Exo-Skeletal Model (Borer, 2005) struggles to explain why Mandarin allows non-quantized objects in telic events, Ramchand’s (2008) First Phase Syntax offers a more promising approach by emphasizing the role of resultative syntax in event delimitation. Under this framework, Mandarin resultative verb compounds and completive particles can be analyzed as merging directly with ResP, providing a syntactic anchor for telicity without requiring object quantization. The main verb (e.g. 洗 ‘wash’) originates in V, while the resultative complement (e.g. 干净 ‘clean’) is base-generated in Res (the head of ResP). The resultative complement undergoes head movement: 干净 moves from Res to adjoin to the verb 洗 in V, forming the compound 洗干净 ‘wash-clean’. In Figure 1(a), where 干净 ‘clean’ (as Res) combines with 洗 ‘wash’ via head movement, and the object 衣服 ‘clothes’ occupies PartP (the complement of ResP). For completive particles (e.g. 完 ‘finish’ in 吃完 ‘finish eating’), the particle is base-generated in Res but lacks a state-change implication. It similarly undergoes head movement to V, but the absence of a result state, namely no equivalent to PartP (cf. out in Figure 1a), reflects its purely terminative function. Figure 1. (Ramchand & Svenonius, 2002; Svenonius, 2005) However, this model still faces challenges in distinguishing between resultative verb compounds (which imply a change of state) and completive particles (which merely signal termination), as both are base-generated in the same Res head position and undergo identical head movement to combine with the main verb. Syntactically, this identical merge-and-move operation makes their structural representations nearly indistinguishable at the phrase-structure level. The semantic difference—state change versus mere termination (particles)—is not overtly marked in syntax but depends on lexical semantics (e.g. 干净 ‘clean’ implying a state versus 完 ‘finish’ lacking it), forcing reliance on interpretive rather than structural cues for differentiation (Ramchand & Svenonius, 2002; Svenonius, 2005). Future research can further investigate how the lexical-aspectual system interacts with syntax to produce such flexible telicity encoding, particularly in comparison with other isolating languages that lack inflectional morphology. 1.3 Child acquisition of telicity The acquisition of telicity in children represents a complex developmental process that engages multiple linguistic and cognitive systems, with research revealing both universal patterns and language-specific variations in how children come to understand event delimitedness. Central to this inquiry is the question of whether children rely more heavily on lexical-semantic features, syntactic configurations, or pragmatic cues when interpreting telicity, and how these different information sources interact during language development. The existing literature presents a nuanced picture where children employ multiple converging strategies, with their relative weighting shifting across developmental stages and varying according to parametric structural properties. A fundamental tension in the literature concerns the primacy of lexical-semantic versus syntactic cues in early telicity judgments. Stoicescu and Dressler’s (2022) investigation of Romanian-speaking children demonstrates that while children as young as 3;4 reliably associate change-of-state verbs (e.g. open ) with culmination, they show delayed sensitivity for incremental theme verbs like eat and drink , particularly when these appear in pragmatically telic contexts. This finding aligns with Lu and Lee’s (2019) work on Mandarin acquisition, where children were found to use telicity as a crucial semantic cue to resolve syntactic ambiguities in verb argument structure, even in the absence of overt morphological marking. Interestingly, Mandarin-speaking children extended telic interpretations to prototypically unergative verbs in postverbal positions, a pattern not found in adult speech, suggesting an early bias toward interpreting syntactic positions as encoding delimitedness. These complementary findings from typologically distinct languages underscore children’s remarkable ability to extract telicity cues from diverse components of the linguistic system, while also highlighting how language-specific properties shape the acquisition trajectory. The syntactic dimension of telicity acquisition has been particularly illuminated by studies examining how children process different structural configurations. Wagner’s (2010) experiments with English-speaking children revealed remarkably early sensitivity to the telicity implications of argument structure, with children as young as 2 years old associating transitive frames with bounded events and intransitive frames with unbounded processes, even when tested with novel verbs. This syntactic bootstrapping ability appears to be constrained by the transparency of structural cues, as demonstrated by Hodgson’s (2009, 2010) study of Spanish acquisition. Spanish-speaking children showed significantly better comprehension of telicity when it was marked through overt object movement (as in location predicates) compared to constructions requiring covert movement operations, suggesting that visible syntactic displacement provides a more accessible cue for young learners. These findings collectively support a developmental trajectory where children first anchor their understanding of telicity in concrete, observable syntactic patterns before gradually mastering more abstract structural mappings. Pragmatic factors introduce additional layers of complexity to the acquisition process, particularly in languages where telicity interpretation depends heavily on contextual and discourse-level information. Jeschull’s (2007) examination of English particle verbs versus simplex verbs revealed that while adults consistently treated particle constructions (e.g. eat up ) as entailing completion and simplex verbs (e.g. eat ) as merely implicating it, children under 6 years old showed only gradual development in making this distinction. Similarly, research on contextual influences (2017) demonstrated that English-speaking children’s telicity judgments were significantly affected by discourse framing, with higher rates of telic interpretations emerging in high-informative contexts where completed events were presented first. This pragmatic flexibility stands in contrast to adults’ more rigid semantic representations, suggesting that children’s early telicity comprehension operates within a broader tolerance for event incompletion. These pragmatic challenges appear particularly pronounced for certain verb classes, as seen in Stoicescu and Dressler’s finding that pragmatically telic incremental theme verbs posed special difficulties for Romanian-speaking children, likely because their bounded interpretation depends more heavily on contextual and world knowledge than on lexical semantics alone. The interaction between cognitive predispositions and linguistic experience becomes especially apparent when examining atypical populations and bilingual learners. Research on German-speaking children with specific language impairment (2018) revealed striking differences in how these children process telicity compared to their typically developing peers. While typically developing children showed a strong endstate orientation—preferentially attending to and encoding completion states—children with language impairment exhibited persistent difficulties in recognizing entailed endpoints, even for verbs with strong culmination semantics. This deficit appeared selective rather than global, as language-impaired children performed comparably to controls when telicity was marked compositionally through particles or other overt morphology. These findings suggest that the challenges faced by children with language impairment may stem primarily from difficulties in integrating syntax-semantics information rather than from the inability to process either component in isolation. On the other end of the spectrum, research about bilingual children has revealed unexpected advantages in aspectual processing, with balanced bilinguals outperforming both monolinguals and language-dominant bilinguals in certain production tasks (Dosi & Greece, 2019). This bilingual advantage, particularly evident in older children, points to the role of metalinguistic awareness and cognitive flexibility in mastering the syntax-semantics interface of telicity. Cross-linguistic comparisons further illuminate how the acquisition of telicity is shaped by the particular structural resources available in a given language. The contrast between the heavy reliance of Mandarin on resultative verb compounds and positional syntax versus Romanian use of perfective morphology versus the dependence of English on particle verbs and object quantization reveals different developmental pathways to the same conceptual understanding. What emerges from these comparisons is not a uniform sequence of acquisition, but rather a set of adaptive strategies that children employ to crack the particular code of their target language. The finding that Mandarin-speaking children can use bare nouns in telic constructions (contrary to the quantization requirements of English), Romanian children struggle with pragmatically determined telicity, and German children excel with morphologically marked telicity, underscores the importance of considering parametric solutions to universal conceptual challenges. Developmentally, current research suggests a progression from a more concrete to a more abstract understanding of telicity. Early in acquisition, children appear to rely on prototypical verb semantics and perceptually salient endpoints, gradually incorporating syntactic cues and finally mastering the pragmatic subtleties of event boundedness. This trajectory is evident in the way children first associate particular verbs with completion (e.g. change-of-state verbs), then generalize to structural patterns (e.g. transitive frames implying delimitedness), and only later appreciate how context modulates these interpretations. The prolonged development of pragmatic telicity, with adult-like precision often not achieved until middle childhood, suggests that full mastery requires not just linguistic competence but also developed theory of mind and information integration abilities. Theoretical implications of these findings are significant for models of language acquisition. The data support hybrid approaches that acknowledge both semantic bootstrapping (relying on verb meaning) and syntactic bootstrapping (using hierarchical cues), with their relative importance varying by language and developmental stage. The challenges faced by language-impaired children point to the importance of integration mechanisms in typical development, while the advantages shown by balanced bilinguals suggest that experience with multiple linguistic systems can enhance metalinguistic awareness of aspectual distinctions. From a learnability perspective, the cross-linguistic variability in telicity marking argues against overly rigid universalist claims, instead supporting models that allow for multiple convergent solutions to the problem of event representation. 2. The Present Study The current study investigates how Mandarin-speaking children acquire how telicity is uniquely encoded, a crucial yet underexplored dimension in early acquisition research. Two research questions are formulated: To what extent can Mandarin children developmentally recognize the independent coding effect of result complements on event delimitedness? To what extent can Mandarin children developmentally differentiate the effect between completive particles and bare verbs on event delimitedness? The theoretical motivation stems from two interrelated gaps in the literature. First, while cross-linguistic studies have extensively documented how children acquire telicity through object quantization or perfective morphology, Mandarin presents a typologically distinct case where resultative verb compounds and completive particles can independently encode event culmination without requiring support from quantized objects or goal phrases. This independence challenges the dominant theoretical model of Borer’s (2005) Exo-Skeletal Model (which emphasizes the role of object quantization), supports Ramchand’s (2008) First Phase Syntax (which emphasizes the role of resultative syntactic heads), and further raises fundamental questions about how children acquire form-meaning mappings when syntax-semantics correspondences diverge from these well-documented patterns. Further, despite the centrality of resultative verb compounds and particles in Mandarin grammar, no systematic acquisition study has examined when and how children recognize their independent telic-marking function, a critical oversight given that these constructions offer a unique window into how learners navigate the syntax-semantics interface in a language where telicity is primarily verb-framed rather than object-dependent. The potential contributions to linguistic theory are twofold. At the level of interface architecture, findings may contribute to current models of the syntax-semantics interface, particularly regarding the projection of ResP. Mandarin result complement merges directly with ResP before head movement to the main verb, which presents a configuration where telicity is encoded largely through verbal morphology rather than argument structure. If children smoothly acquire these forms as independent telic markers early in development, it would support Ramchand’s (2008) First Phase Syntax over strictly quantization-based accounts, demonstrating that learners can project telicity syntactically without object-level quantification. Moreover, the optionality of object quantization in Mandarin telic events provides a natural experiment for testing whether children initially default to universal quantization strategies or language-specific verb-framed solutions. Mandarin-acquiring children may develop qualitatively different processing routines for telicity compared to learners of object-dependent languages, a possibility this study can empirically evaluate. The developmental implications of this study extend beyond linguistic theory to fundamental questions about how children construct and manipulate event representations, a core capacity in human cognition. Research on event perception demonstrates that early children develop sophisticated non-linguistic sensitivities to intentional boundaries, showing preferential attention to completion points in physical events (Baldwin et al., 2001) and revealing memory advantages for goal information versus ongoing actions (Loucks & Meltzoff, 2013). However, the interface between these domain-general event cognition abilities and language-specific encoding strategies remains under-explored. The unique telicity system of Mandarin provides a natural experiment to examine whether children’s emerging linguistic representations are constrained by universal cognitive biases (i.e. a proposed natural preference for holistic event representation) or shaped by language-specific structural regularities. The developmental trajectory of comprehension of telicity encoding markers across ages 6-9, as investigated in the study, may reveal critical periods when children transition from relying on perceptual cues (e.g. visible state changes for resultative compounds) to mastering abstract grammatical markers (e.g. purely functional particles). The pattern can align with broader findings about middle childhood as a pivotal stage for developing metalinguistic awareness (Melogno et al., 2022). Moreover, comparing performance across different predicate types (e.g. creation VS consumption verbs) could illuminate whether conceptual differences in event causality influence the acquisition of linguistic telicity markers. The age-stratified design offers unique insights into how children integrate multiple cognitive systems—event perception and syntax-semantics analysis—during a period of rapid cognitive maturation (Case, 1992). 3. Methodology 3.1 Participants The participants were monolingual Mandarin-speaking children from urban communities in Beijing, primarily from middle-class families, and were tested in a controlled laboratory setting in Beijing. 60 children stratified into 4 age groups: 6-, 7-, 8-, and 9-year-olds (15 participants per group). A separate cohort of 60 children with the same age distribution will participate in experiment 2 to avoid carryover effects. All children will be typically developing with no reported language or cognitive impairments and will be recruited. The participants will be excluded if they score below 80% of accuracy of the filler condition. No research ethics committee approval was gained. 3.2 Materials Motivated by Koutamanis et al.’s (2024) and Martínez et al.’s (2023) studies, this research employs a picture selection task as a children-friendly approach to examine learners’ syntax-semantics acquisition of telicity features. Experiment 1 tests the role of result complements in telicity, featuring 15 scenarios per condition: bare verb condition (atelic), result complement condition (telic), and fillers. Each scenario will pair with three pictures: one correct, one incorrect, and one distractive. The presentation order of pictures across conditions and the set order of answers are pseudo-randomized. Take the bare verb condition as an example, (12) shows a full scenario presented to the participants. Here, Figure 1 may hold true if the sentence is presented with a resultative verb compound (e.g. 小明切开/断面包 ‘The bread is completely cut through.’). (12) 小明家在餐桌前准备吃饭，小明切面包。现在的场景是什么样的呢？ (Xiaoming’s family is getting ready to have a meal at the dining table. Xiaoming cuts the bread. What is the current scene like?) Figure 1 . Picture A (incorrect): The bread is completely sliced. Figure 2 . Picture B (correct): The action of slicing the bread is in progress. Figure 3 . Picture C (interference): The action of slicing the orange is in progress. Experiment 2 examines completive particles (e.g. 完/wán/, 掉/diào/, 到 /dào/, 好/ hǎo/, and 住 /zhù/) versus bare verbs, with 15 scenarios per condition: bare verb condition (atelic), completive particle condition (telic), and fillers. Each scenario will pair with three pictures: one correct, one incorrect, and one distractive. The presentation order of pictures across conditions and the set order of answers are pseudo-randomized. Take the completive particle condition as an example, (13) shows a full scenario presented to the participants. (13) 小明在球场打篮球，他抓住篮球。现在的场景是什么样的呢？ (Xiaoming is playing basketball on the court, and he catches the basketball. What is the current scene like?) Figure 4 . Picture A (incorrect): Xiaoming manages to catch the basketball but only grabs it. Figure 5 . Picture B (correct): Xiaoming successfully catches the basketball. Figure 6 . Picture C (interference): Xiaoming successfully catches the football. Given the vocabulary level of the youngest age group (i.e. 6-year-old children), both experiments will select the 3500 most frequently used Chinese characters from BLCU Corpus Center (BCC) and a list of commonly used modern Chinese words (National Chinese Language Commission, 1988). This control ensures that children will not struggle to complete the experiments due to comprehension difficulties. In all stimuli, V+NP is set to follow a pattern of one character plus two characters (e.g. 折 ‘fold’+纸船 ‘paper boat’). Both resultative verb compounds and completive particles are set as a single character to follow the verb. In addition, no aspect marker will be added, including 了 /le/, 着 /zhe/, and 过 /guò/, which can refrain the participants from relying upon this cue for making judgment. The stimuli will be reviewed by native Mandarin-speaking adults, who are to confirm that the stimuli are grammatically correct and the accompanying images are sufficiently distinct to help pinpoint the correct answers. 3.3 Procedure In both experiments, the participants will be tested individually. In each trial, three pictures will be displayed simultaneously on PowerPoint slides, and the participants respond by marking their answers on a response sheet with a pen in 10 seconds. The 10-second time window aims to elicit their instinctive judgments about event structure. The audio will be pre-recorded, but if anyone fails to hear it clearly, the experimenter will repeat it. Given their young age and thus limited attention span, 45 trials will be divided into 3 blocks, with each block followed by a 1-minute break. 3.4 Data analysis Data analysis will employ generalized linear mixed-effects models implemented in Python by using the statsmodels and pingouin packages to examine children’s accuracy in selecting telicity-appropriate pictures. Given the categorical nature of the dependent variable (correct VS incorrect selection), mixed ANOVA will be used to analyze the effects of fixed factors (i.e. age group, condition). For each experiment, separate models will be constructed to address the primary research questions while accounting for random effects of participants and items by using maximum likelihood estimation. For experiment 1, the primary model will test the fixed effects of age group (6-, 7-, 8-, 9-year-olds), condition (bare verb VS resultative verb compound), and their interaction, with random intercepts for participants and items. A significant interaction would indicate developmental differences in sensitivity to resultative complements as telicity markers. Post-hoc pairwise comparisons with Bonferroni corrections will dissect age-specific effects by using the multicomp module. A similar model will compare the accuracy between the telic condition (resultative compounds) in experiment 1 and the telic condition (completive particles) in experiment 2 by using the anova_lm function for model comparison. Data analysis in experiment 2 will extend this framework by incorporating completive particle type ( 完 /wán/, 掉 /diào/, 到 /dào/, 好 / hǎo/, and 住 /zhù/) as an additional fixed effect. A three-way interaction (age×condition×particle type) will test whether certain particles are acquired earlier or pose greater difficulty. Contrasts will compare particles pairwise within and across age groups by using planned orthogonal comparisons. To evaluate potential cross-experiment differences in atelic interpretations, a combined model will compare accuracy for bare verbs between experiments, with experiment (1 VS 2) as a fixed effect. Model assumptions will be verified by using variance inflation factors for multicollinearity and Q-Q plots for residual normality. Model fit will be assessed via likelihood ratio tests comparing nested models, with significance thresholds set at α=0.05. Effect sizes (odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals) will quantify the magnitude of key contrasts. For exploratory insights, random slopes will be tested for condition-by-participant effects by using the MixedLM function to account for individual variability in sensitivity to telicity cues. To address potential confounding effects from filler trials, a separate model will exclude filler data and re-examine primary effects. Sensitivity analyses will ensure adequate power for detecting interactions by using simulated datasets. Complete analysis scripts will be made publicly available alongside the preregistered analysis plan. This Python-based approach maintains the rigor of the original R-based design while leveraging the growing ecosystem of Python for statistical modeling in psycholinguistics. References 1. Anderson, C. (2017). Contextual Factors In Children’s Calculation Of Telicity . Proceedings of the 41st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Google Scholar 2. Arunachalam, S. & Syrett, K. (2018). Telicity in typical and impaired acquisition. In Semantics In Language Acquisition (vol. 24). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.06sch Crossref Google Scholar 3. Baldwin, D. A., Baird, J. A., Saylor, M. M. & Clark, M. 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Wagner, L. (2010). Inferring meaning from syntactic structures in acquisition: the case of transitivity and telicity. Language & Cognitive Processes , 25(10), 1354-1379. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960903488375 Crossref Google Scholar 24. Wang, S. Y. (2024). 终结性句法编码的语言共性、差异及其理论解释 [The Syntactic encoding of telicity: universality, variation and theoretical accounts]. 外国语文研究 [Foreign Language Research], 1, 135-151. Google Scholar Information & Authors Information Version history V1 Version 1 12 August 2025 Copyright This work is licensed under a Non Exclusive No Reuse License. Keywords child acquisition of event structure syntax-semantics interface telicity Authors Affiliations Yihang Zhong 0000-0003-4206-3686 [email protected] The Chinese University of Hong Kong View all articles by this author Qi’ao Yang Beijing No 80 High School View all articles by this author Xiang Meng Beijing No 80 High School View all articles by this author Zhizhong Tian Beijing No 80 High School View all articles by this author Metrics & Citations Metrics Article Usage 256 views 97 downloads .FvxKWukQNSOunydq8rnd { width: 100px; } Citations Download citation Yihang Zhong, Qi’ao Yang, Xiang Meng, et al. Aspect In Telicity Acquisition: Evidence From Mandarin Children. Authorea . 12 August 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.175502883.35424339/v1 If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download. 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