Donkey pronouns in child Mandarin: Insights into the ∃/∀ dichotomy

Donkey pronouns and plural definites show similarities in exhibiting the existential/universal dichotomy with respect to monotonicity, discourse contexts and lexical semantics of the predicate with which they are combined. The parallel between the two elements suggests a unified analysis. Studies of children’s understanding of plural definites show that children initially interpret plural definites existentially rather than universally. The findings invite us to ask whether children also interpret donkey pronouns existentially. Two experiments were conducted to compare children’ and adults’ interpretation of donkey pronouns in conditional and relative-clause donkey sentences. The results of Experiment 1 show that children preferred the existential reading, whereas adults entertained the universal reading for both types of donkey sentences in upward-entailing contexts. Experiment 2 examined whether monotonicity influences the interpretation of donkey pronouns by creating a downward-entailing context. The findings were that in a downward-entailing context both children and adults preferred the existential reading. The findings led us to propose that the existential reading is perhaps the default semantics of donkey pronouns while the universal reading is derived, and we suggest that the derivational path is bridged by free choice strengthening. The findings were then discussed in relation to the unified analysis of plural definites by Magri (2014) and Bar-Lev (2018).

A First Step toward the Clinical Application of Landmark-Based Acoustic Analysis in Child Mandarin

As an initial step for the clinical application of landmark-based acoustic analysis in child Mandarin, the study quantified the developmental trajectories of consonants produced by four-to-seven-year-old children who acquired Taiwanese Mandarin as their first language. The results from a total of 80 children (20 in each age group, with gender balanced) indicated that younger age groups produced more +b landmark features than seven-year-olds did, showing that the development of obstruents was not completed by the age of six. A multiple regression showed that the participants’ speech intelligibility scores could be predicted by landmark features. Additionally, the +b landmark feature demonstrated the strongest net effect on speech intelligibility scores. The findings indicated that: (a) the landmark feature +b was an essential indicator of speech development in child Mandarin and; (b) the consonantal development in child Mandarin could be predicted by the physiological complexity of the articulatory gestures. Future studies focusing on a wider range of population (e.g., typically developing adults, aging and other clinical groups) with different language backgrounds are encouraged to apply landmark-based acoustic analysis to trace the linguistic development of a particular group.

Portioning-Out and Individuation in Mandarin Non-interrogative wh-Pronominal Phrases: Experimental Evidence From Child Mandarin

Portioning-out and individuation are two important semantic properties for the characterization of countability. In Mandarin, nouns are not marked with count-mass syntax, and it is controversial whether individuation is encoded in classifiers or in nouns. In the present study, we investigates the interpretation of a minimal pair of non-interrogative wh-pronominal phrases, including duo-shao-N and duo-shao-ge-N. Due to the presence/absence of the individual classifier ge, these two wh-pronominal phrases differ in how they encode portioning-out and individuation. In two experiments, we used a Truth Value Judgment Task to examine the interpretation of these two wh-pronominal phrases by Mandarin-speaking adults and 4-to-6-year-old children. We found that both adults and children are sensitive to their interpretative differences with respect to the portioning-out and individuation properties. They assign either count or mass readings to the bare wh-pronominal phrase duo-shao-N depending on specific contexts, but only count readings to the classifier-bearing wh-pronominal phrase duo-shao-ge-N. Moreover, the portioning-out and individuation properties associated with the individual classifier ge emerge independently in the course of language development, with the portioning-out property taking precedence over the individuation property. Taken together, the present study provides new evidence for the view that the portioning-out and individuation properties in Mandarin are encoded in classifiers rather than in nouns, and these two semantic properties are two distinct components in our grammar.

A Corpus-Based Comparison of the Pragmatic Use of Qian and Hou to Examine the Applicability of Space–Time Metaphor Hypothesis in Early Child Mandarin

The Universal Space–Time Mapping Hypothesis suggests that temporal expression is based on spatial metaphor for all human beings. This study examines its applicability in the Chinese language using the data elicited from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus (ECMC) (Li and Tse, 2011), which collected the utterances produced by 168 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in a semistructured play context. The unique pair of Chinese words, qian (前/before/front) and hou (后/after/back), which can be used to express either time (before/after) or space (front/back) in daily communication, was the unit of analysis. The results indicated that: (1) there was a significant age effect in the production of “qian/hou,” indicating that the period before the age of 4.5 may be critical for the development of temporal and spatial expression; (2) the pair was produced to express time (before/after) much earlier than space (front/back), indicating that the expression of time might not necessarily be based on the spatial metaphor; and (3) the pair was used more frequently to express time (before/after) than space (front/back) by the preschoolers, thus challenging the hypothesis.

Domain restriction in child Mandarin: Implications for quantifier spreading

This study explores Mandarin children’s competence with quantifier domain restriction. We present results from two experiments in which adults and four- to five-year old children evaluated two possible candidates for the domain selection associated with the distributive operator dou ‘all’ in Mandarin Chinese. In the first experiment, we investigated whether children and adults are capable of selecting an appropriate domain when two candidate NPs both appear inside dou’s quantification scope; i.e., both of the NPs c-command dou. In the second experiment, still two candidate NPs were presented, but one within dou’s scope and the other outside its scope. Our results indicate that four- to five-year-old children are capable of basic distributive computation associated with dou, but they may choose an NP that adults do not usually choose as the domain of dou, resulting in non-adult interpretations of distributive computation in certain cases. Based on the results, we propose that four- to five-year-old children are less certain about the domain restriction associated with dou-quantification. This proposal has important implications for the current debate on the acquisition of universal quantifiers, specifically, the problem of quantifier spreading. We explain children’s uncertainty about the domain restriction with a universal grammar-based statistical acquisition model.

Chinese preschoolers’ acquisition of temporal adverbs indicating past, present, and future: a corpus-based study

This study investigated the development of temporal adverbs in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of temporal adverbs indicating the past, present, and future were extracted from the Early Child Mandarin Corpus (168 children in four age groups: 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, 5;6). Data analyses indicated: (1) Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 21 types of temporal adverbs, and the children in the first age group (M = 2;6) were capable of using temporal adverbs to denote past, present, and future events; (2) within each age group, the children produced significantly more future temporal adverbs than the other two subtypes; and (3) there was a significant age effect that, with increased age, more children were able to produce all subtypes of temporal adverbs. Overall, findings of this corpus-based investigation shed light upon Chinese children's early-attained ability to express the three fundamental notions of time by resorting to the appropriate linguistic devices.