Children's Acquisition of Tail-recursion Sequences: A Review of Locative Recursion and Possessive Recursion as Examples
It tackles the problem of understanding language acquisition mechanisms for linguists and cognitive scientists, but is incremental as it reviews existing research without new findings.
This systematic review examines children's acquisition of tail-recursion sequences, such as locative and possessive recursion, to address debates on whether acquisition is gradual or synchronous and symmetric or asymmetric, but does not provide concrete numerical results.
Recursion is the nature of human natural language. Since Chomsky proposed generative grammar, many scholars have studied recursion either theoretically or empirically. However, by observing children's acquisition of tail recursion sequences, we can verify the nativism of language supported by universal grammar and reveal the cognitive mechanism of human brain. To date, our understanding of children's acquisition path of recursion and influencing factors still remain controversial. This systematic review summarizes the research of tail recursive sequence by taking possessive recursion and locative recursion as examples, focusing on the experimental methods, acquisition paths, and influencing factors of tail recursive sequence. The current behavioural experiments reveal that, the debate about children's performance revolves around: 1) Gradual acquisition or synchronous acquisition. 2) symmetry or asymmetry between the acquisition of locative recursion sequences and possessive recursion sequences. We presume that children can acquire recursion quickly in a short period of time thanks to the language acquisition device, though there are also scholars who believe that a third factor also plays a role.