  There have been apparently conflicting claims over the syntax-semantics
relationship in child acquisition. However, few of them have assessed the
child's path toward the acquisition of recursive relative clauses (RRCs). The
authors of the current paper did experiments to investigate 3- to 11-year-olds'
most-structured elicited production of eight Mandarin RRCs in a 4 (syntactic
types)*2 (semantic conditions) design. The four syntactic types were RRCs with
a subject-gapped RC embedded in an object-gapped RC (SORRCs), RRCs with an
object-gapped RC embedded in another object-gapped RC (OORRCs), RRCs with an
object-gapped RC embedded in a subject-gapped RC (OSRRCs), and RRCs with a
subject-gapped RC embedded in another subject-gapped RC (SSRRCs). Each
syntactic type was put in two conditions differing in internal semantics:
irreversible internal semantics (IIS) and reversible internal semantics (RIS).
For example, "the balloon that [the girl that _ eats the banana] holds _" is
SORRCs in the IIS condition; "the monkey that [the dog that _ bites the pig]
hits_" is SORRCs in the RIS condition. For each target, the participants were
provided with a speech-visual stimulus constructing a condition of irreversible
external semantics (IES). The results showed that SSRRCs, OSRRCs and SORRCs in
the IIS-IES condition were produced two years earlier than their counterparts
in the RIS-IES condition. Thus, a 2-stage development path is proposed: the
language acquisition device starts with the interface between (irreversible)
syntax and IIS, and ends with the interface between syntax and IES, both
abiding by the syntax-semantic interface principle.
