This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use Mandarin Chinese, a language lacking tense markers, to represent characters’ speech in their story narratives. Eighty participants, from three to six years of age, completed an elicited narrative task based on a wordless picture book. The representing forms and signals that they employed in representing activities were assessed. The results showed a significant age-related increase in the overall use of speech representation by the cohort of children. Regarding representing forms, direct representation exhibited its expected dominance among all age groups, and its presence in children’s narratives grew significantly with age. Concerning representing signals, shuō ‘say’ was the most prevalent across all ages and susceptible to significant age effects, and, with advancing age, children’s representing signals expanded from single verbs to more complex syntactic constructions. In addition, no significant gender effects were observed regarding the representing forms or signals that Mandarin-speaking children used.

本研究调查了讲普通话的儿童如何使用普通话（一种缺乏时态标记的语言）来代表故事叙述中人物的讲话。80 名年龄从 3 岁到 6 岁的参与者根据一本无字图画书完成了一项引出的叙事任务。评估了他们在表示活动时使用的表示形式和信号。结果显示，儿童群体对语音表示的整体使用随着年龄的增长而显着增加。关于表征形式，直接表征在所有年龄组中都表现出预期的优势，并且随着年龄的增长，它在儿童叙事中的存在显着增加。关于表示信号，shuō“说”在所有年龄段中最普遍，并且容易受到显着的年龄影响，并且随着年龄的增长，儿童的表示信号从单个动词扩展到更复杂的句法结构。此外，对于讲普通话的儿童使用的表示形式或信号，没有观察到显着的性别影响。