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ERIC Number: EJ1356251
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022
Pages: 31
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1048-9223
EISSN: EISSN-1532-7817
Do Children Know "Wh"anything? 3-Year-Olds Know the Ambiguity of "Wh"-Phrases in Mandarin
Yang, Yu'an; Goodhue, Daniel; Hacquard, Valentine; Lidz, Jeffrey
Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, v29 n3 p296-326 2022
"Wh"-phrases in Mandarin have an interrogative (like English "what") and an indefinite (like English "a/some") interpretation. Previous comprehension studies find that children can access both interpretations around 4.5 years old; studies with younger children focus on production and find that children between 2 and 4.5 do not reliably produce the indefinite interpretation in naturalistic speech or in elicited imitation tasks. In this article, we use comprehension tasks to examine 3-year-olds' interpretation of "wh"-phrases. We find that they have adult-like interpretations of "wh"-phrases in two different contexts: in "dou"-sentences (Experiment 1), where the indefinite interpretation is the only available interpretation and the whole sentence receives a universal reading (roughly equivalent to English "any"), and in negated sentences (Experiment 2), where the interpretation of "wh"-phrases depends on prosodic prominence and the indefinite interpretation leads to an existential reading of the sentence.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: China (Beijing)
Grant or Contract Numbers: 1449815