This chapter assessed 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children’s ability to distinguish between wh-questions, universal statements and universal Free Choice Inferences (FCIs). The assessment was undertaken in three experiments, using a Question-Statement tas...[继续阅读]

    In the theoretical literature, wh-words in different languages have been analysed as inherently existential quantifiers, the so-called -items of Chierchia (2013) (also see Chomsky 1966; Fox 2007; Haspelmath 1997; Karttunen 1977; Liao 2011). Both syntactic...[继续阅读]

    Previous research has demonstrated that Mandarin-speaking children compute Free Choice Inferences in affirmative sentences with the disjunction word huozhe ‘or’, as well as in sentences with the polarity sensitive expressionrenhe ‘any’ (Huang & Crain 2014...[继续阅读]

    Experiment 3 was designed to investigate children’s interpretation of zhiyou ‘only’ as introducing external negation to sentences with disjunction alone, which served a preliminary step to probe children’s computation of FCIs in sentences that contained a...[继续阅读]

    Both the syntax and the semantics of the Mandarin quantificational adverb dou ‘all’ have received considerable attention in the theoretical literature. Despite continuing debate, it is generally agreed that dou ‘all’ is an adverbial quantifier with univer...[继续阅读]

    Experiment 4 investigated if both Mandarin-speaking children and adults negate but not cancel Free Choice Inferences in sentences with external negation. Compared with Experiment 3, Experiment 4 added the deontic modal verb keyi ‘is allowed to’ into the e...[继续阅读]

    One of the central issues in cognitive science is to understand how children acquire language. In the past five decades, developmental psycholinguists have responded to a theoretical approach to language that views language acquisition as a fundamental go...[继续阅读]

    Experiment 3 examined whether children would license conjunctive inferences for the same test sentences as Experiment 2, in contexts that included additional objects, beyond those mentioned in the test sentences.ParticipantsThe same children and adults th...[继续阅读]

    In previous studies, preschool Mandarin-speaking children were found to compute Free Choice Inferences in affirmative sentences (Huang & Crain 2014; Tieu et al. 2016; Zhou et al. 2013). A representative study is by Zhou et al. (2013). Using a Truth Value ...[继续阅读]

    Experiment 2 was designed to assess Mandarin-speaking children’sunderstanding of sentences with a wh-word followed by dou and a modal verb. For adults, such sentences license free choice inferences. The experiment contrasted sentences with a wh-word follo...[继续阅读]