Applied Psycholinguistics 31 (2010), 1–28 doi:10.1017/S0142716409990257 The development of aspectual marking in child Mandarin Chinese JIDONG CHEN California State University at Fresno YASUHIRO SHIRAI University of Pittsburgh Received: December 1, 2007 Accepted for publication: January 7, 2009 ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Jidong Chen, Department of Linguistics, California State University at Fresno, 5245 North Backer Avenue, PB 92, Fresno, CA 93740. E-mail: jchen@csufresno.edu ABSTRACT Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal ten- dency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four grammatical aspect markers in Mandarin, -le (perfective), zai (progressive), -zhe (durative), and -guo (experiential), in the longitudinal speech data of four children acquiring Mandarin Chinese. It was found that the emergence of grammatical aspect marking generally follows the predictions of the aspect hypothesis, perfective -le predominantly appearing with telic verbs, whereas progressive zai is almost exclusively used with activity verbs. However, the typological features of Mandarin also affect the early uses of -le, which is used with stative predicates more frequently than predicted, and the input patterns play an important role in children’s aspect marking. The results support a usage-based learning process in accord with a language-specific system of aspectual semantics, rather than a strong universal association of grammatical aspect and lexical aspect. The acquisition of tense-aspect marking has been extensively investigated for the past 30 years or so, and has been a center of debate for the roles of cognitive development (e.g., Bronckart & Sinclair, 1973), innate predisposition in learning (e.g., Bickerton, 1981, 1984), and input-based learning (Shirai & Andersen, 1995; Tomasello, 1992). Despite much controversy, one generalization has emerged: the strong effect of verb semantics (i.e., lexical aspect) on the acquisition of grammatical marking of tense and aspect, a phenomenon that has entered into the literature as the aspect hypothesis (e.g., Li & Shirai, 2000; Shirai, 1998a; Shirai, Slobin, & Weist, 1998). The explanation of the effect of lexical aspect is still an open issue. Are they simply an artifact of verb-specific memory based learning (Pinker, 1984; Tomasello, 1992)? Are there semantic biases in children’s learning (Shirai & Andersen 1995)? Or are they simply a reflection of innate predisposition, for example, as claimed in Bickerton’s (1981) bioprogram hypothesis that children © Cambridge University Press 2009 0142-7164/10 $15.00