This research is supported by the Central University Basic Research Fund of China (Grant No. ZK1125) and Fujian Provincial Federation of Social Sciences (Grant No. FJ2024C050).

This research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. ZK1125), the Fujian Provincial Federation of Social Sciences (Grant No. FJ2024C050), and the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No.23BYY170).

This article, which is adapted from a chapter of my doctoral thesis, would not have come to fruition without the guidance of Professor YANG Caimei, my doctoral supervisor at Soochow University. Professor Yang has more than 20 years research experience on recursive relative structures and has two national-level funding related to this topic. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Yang for her invaluable guidance, support, and inspiration throughout my doctoral journey. She provided me with numerous opportunities that significantly enhanced my research capabilities. Particularly, I have learned a great deal from discussions with her regarding experimental design and data collection in child language acquisition. I also thank her for the time and effort dedicated to helping me construct a framework to account for the triggering effect of pragmatic-conceptual representations on syntax.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Professor Tom Roeper, who offered constructive comments on the first draft of this article. Professor Roeper also introduced me to Professor Kristine Yu, who not only allowed me to sit in on her class entitled “Tone and Intonation” but also gave advice on how to control prosody in my experimental design. Professor Roeper also introduced me to Professor Brian Dillon and Professor Shota Momma, who allowed me to sit in on their classes entitled “Psychological Background to Linguistics,” at which I presented my design and benefited from the audience’s feedback regarding the interpretation of the results. I also wish to extend my gratitude to many colleagues, including Adina Camelia Bleotu, Deborah Foucault Etheridge, Jill de Villiers, Usha Lakshmanan, among others (in the alphabetic order of their given name), with whom I discussed the article in the Recursion Meetings at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which I visited under the sponsor provided by China Scholarships Council during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I would also like to thank Dr. Gao Jianqiang for his help with the video design used in the experiment and the assistants, including Li Hongyan, Tuo Xiaofang, Yang Hailiang, among others, for their help with data collection. Special thanks should be given to the participants for their cooperation.

In our opinion, Yang et al. (2022, 2023) could be further refined. One area for improvement in the experimental design is the pragmatic implausibility that may limit the conjunction analysis. For example, in their design, OO (e.g., 5a) can be interpreted as conjunction, including (a) [[gege yang de] [yu tu de] paopao] and (b) [[gege yang de] [yu tu de paopao]], both interpreted as the bubbles the fish blows and the brother feeds. However, the predicate–argument represented by yang-paopao (feed-bubbles) is pragmatically implausible (since the brother cannot feed the bubbles). Similarly, SO (e.g., 5b) can also be interpreted as coordination, including (a) [[chi xiangjiao de] [jiejie na de] qiqiu] and (b) [[chi xiangjiao de][jiejie na de qiqiu]], both interpreted as the balloon that the sister holds and that eats bananas. However, the predicate–argument represented by xiangjiao-chi-paopao (banana-eat-balloon) is anti-pragmatic (since the balloon cannot eat the banana). It is therefore unclear whether this implausibility enhances or hinders the acquisition of OO and SO. Another area for improvement is that Yang et al. (2022, 2023) only used one test sentence in OO and SO in each condition, hurting the statistical power.

Taking above together, the current study made contributions to the literature as follows. First, the current study provided empirical evidence on whether and how prosodic pause cues syntax through manipulating conjunction-biased and recursion-biased prosodic patterns (i.e. the current design created three prosodic conditions by manipulating the pause interval and pause placement). Second, the current design also created the pragmatic plausibility that allowed the ambiguity of the conjunction analysis vs. recursive analysis. Finally, to realize a robust statistical power compared with Yang et al.’s design where only one test sentence was used in both OO and SO, the current design used three tokens for each type of structures (i.e., OO and SO).