| Chinese Abstract | 第4-6页 |
| Abstract | 第6-7页 |
| Introduction | 第14-21页 |
| Research Objectives | 第14-17页 |
| Research Questions | 第17-18页 |
| Significance of the Study | 第18-19页 |
| Organization of the Thesis | 第19-21页 |
| Chapter one Literature Review | 第21-32页 |
| 1.1 The Theoretical Studies on the Comparative Construction | 第21-26页 |
| 1.1.1 the Semantics of the Comparative Construction | 第21-22页 |
| 1.1.2 The Syntax of the Comparative Construction | 第22-26页 |
| 1.2 The Acquisition Studies of the Comparative Construction | 第26-29页 |
| 1.2.1 Li XiangNong, Zhou GuoGuang, Kong LingDa (1990) | 第27-29页 |
| 1.2.2 Zhou GuoGuang , Wang BaoHua (2001) | 第29页 |
| 1.3 The Characteristic of the Comparative Construction in Child Mandarin | 第29-32页 |
| Chapter two Experimental Investigations of the Comparative Constructions | 第32-44页 |
| 2.1 Overview of the Experiments | 第32-35页 |
| 2.2 Experiment One: Sentence-Picture Matching Task | 第35-39页 |
| 2.2.1 Research Subjects | 第35页 |
| 2.2.2 Research Procedure and Design | 第35-39页 |
| 2.3 Experiment Two: Syntactic Priming Task | 第39-44页 |
| 2.3.1 Research Subjects | 第40页 |
| 2.3.2 Research Procedure and Design | 第40-44页 |
| Chapter Three Experimental Results and Discussion | 第44-65页 |
| 3.1 The Comprehension of the Comparatives in Experiement one | 第44-56页 |
| 3.1.1 Mandarin-speaking Children's Comprehension of comparative with Different Syntactic structures | 第44-51页 |
| 3.1.2 Mandarin-speaking Children's Comprehension of Comparative with Different Property | 第51-56页 |
| 3.2 The Production of the Comparatives in Experiment two | 第56-65页 |
| 3.2.1 Mandarin-speaking Children's Production of the comparatives | 第57-61页 |
| 3.2.2 The Development Stages of the Comparative Constructions | 第61-65页 |
| Chapter Four Children’s Knowledge of the Comparative Construction | 第65-71页 |
| 4.1 Children’s Knowledge Presented in the Two Experiments | 第65-67页 |
| 4.2 Features of Children’s Knowledge of the Comparative Construction | 第67-69页 |
| 4.2.1 Features of the Children’s Comprehension | 第67-68页 |
| 4.2.2 Features of the Children’s Production | 第68-69页 |
| 4.3 Reconsidering the Learnability of Comparative Structures | 第69-71页 |
| Conclusion | 第71-75页 |
| Works Cited | 第75-79页 |
| Acknowledgements | 第79-81页 |
| Appendix : Experimental Design in Chinese | 第81-83页 |
| Appendix : Informative Abstract in Chinese | 第83-88页 |
| Résumé and Publications since Entering the Program | 第88页 |
