We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.

中文翻译：

---

婴儿在 17 个月时有抽象的词序语法知识吗？来自普通话的证据。

我们将怪异的词序范式与伪动词的使用和偏好范式相结合，测试了非常年轻的普通话学习者对及物句的理解，复制了 Franck 的实验等。（2013）关于法语。17 名发育正常的普通话婴儿（平均年龄：17.4 个月）参与其中，并且对 18 名成年人进行了相同的实验。结果表明，听到格式良好的 NP-V-NP 句子会促使婴儿更多地关注及物场景而不是反身场景。相比之下，当他们听到异常的 NP-NP-V 序列时，没有发现这种偏好模式，这是一种类似于成人的表现模式。这与 Candan 的一些结果不一致等。（2012 年），在考虑注视时间时，他仅在将近 3 岁时才发现规范词序理解的证据。此外，在测试的年龄范围内，表现没有年龄或词汇量的影响。