An investigation of how Mandarin-speaking children aged three to eight interpret sentences involving the universal quantifier "mei" ("every") and the quantificational adverbs "dou" ("all") and "quan" ("all") focused on how and when the child acquires adult interpretations of the quantifiers' scope. The subjects were 122 children in Beijing, and a control group of 20 adult university students and staff members. The instrument consisted of picture identification tasks, in which the children chose pictures to correspond to statements or manipulated toys with respect to empty boxes large enough to hold them. The results suggest that: (1) Mandarin-speaking children will have acquired universality of scope by age four, while their grasp of adult norms for scope relations does not come until after age eight, and acquisition of totality of scope precedes that of scope relations; (2) the young child does not show bias in interpreting sentences whose scope relations are understood with a clear bias for adults; (3) the ability to handle scope relations is contingent on the ability to recognize certain noun phrases and adverbs and is quantificational in nature; and (4) young children employ a unitary mechanism for comprehending scope relations, so sentences involving two universal and existential quantificational expressions will be understood in essentially the same way. (MSE)