This dissertation is about children’s ability to generate logical entailments as well as their ability to license pragmatic inferences, so it’s necessary to introduce some of the key concepts in advance. The next section mainly sketches the critical disti...[继续阅读]

    In Chinese, sentences with wh-words (e.g., shei ‘who’, shenme ‘what’) can either be interpreted as declarative statements or as wh-questions, depending on the presence or absence of the adverbial quantifier dou ‘all’. In the absence of dou ‘all’, Chinese ...[继续阅读]

    This chapter summarizes the major findings and discusses more globally the implications of the findings. Briefly speaking, this dissertation reports experimental results of preschool Mandarin-speaking children’s knowledge of the entailments and inferences...[继续阅读]

    Experiment 1 was designed to investigate whether Mandarin-speaking children understand that sentences with a wh-word followed by dou generate a universal interpretation. The experiment contrasted sentences with a wh-word followed by dou versus ones with a...[继续阅读]

    A sentence is potentially ambiguous if there are two possible scope assignments at the level of semantics. Consider the sentence Every boy did not catch a fish. Out of blue, this sentence is ambiguous. It can be interpreted as: None of the boys caught a f...[继续阅读]

    It has been reported that negative sentences are more difficult to process than their affirmative counterparts (see e.g., Carpenter, Just, Keller, Eddy & Thulborn 1999; Sherman 1976; Wason 1959). Nevertheless, several other studies have shown that both ch...[继续阅读]

    Experiment 1 assessed the interpretation that Mandarin-speaking children and adults assigned to sentences with internal negation, a modal verb anddisjunction. Before introducing the typical test sentence, let’s consider a simple English sentence with inte...[继续阅读]

    A related finding is that children compute universal free choice inferencesin sentences with a wh-word followed by dou and a modal verb. Using the Question-Statement Task, Zhou (2017) investigated Mandarin-speaking children’s interpretation of sentences w...[继续阅读]

    In addition to entailments, the present study is also concerned with several different semantic/pragmatic inferences. One of these inferences is witnessed in sentence (3), where disjunction appears in the scope of the deontic modal verb is allowed to.(3) ...[继续阅读]

    In this section, we review the relevant previous studies focusing on children’s interpretation of disjunction. We will first review previous studiesin which children were found to reject statements with disjunction in circumstances in which only one disju...[继续阅读]