Pragmatic comprehension: A developmental study of Mandarin-speaking children's strategies for interpretation of given and new information

As their language develops, children acquire strategies to utilize surface forms (syntactic, prosodic, semantic, and morphological) to interpret the meaning and functions of sentences, including the ability to interpret information as Given or New. In Mandarin Chinese, the postverbal position in active, the position after bei in passive, the position after shi in cleft and pseudocleft, and stress tend to encode New information.;This study investigates how Chinese-speaking children, aged 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and adults utilize word order and structure in the above four sentence types, and different levels of stress to interpret Given and New information in isolated (hereafter IC) and contextualized (hereafter CC) conditions. In IC, the determination of Given and New was made within isolated sentences, while in CC, the identification of Given and New was made across sentences. In both conditions, three stress conditions were provided for each sentence type: normal stress on New, emphatic stress on New, and emphatic stress on Given. Subjects' choice and description of pictures in IC, and choice of the context sentence in CC were considered to be measures of their comprehension of the Given and New distinctions implied in a particular stimulus. It was hypothesized that: (1) in IC, subjects would assume Given information to be true, and focus their attention on New information; (2) in CC, subjects would choose the context sentence that contained the Given information of the stimulus. The results revealed that: (1) children were unable to use word order effectively in IC; a U-shaped development of using word order was found between five- and nine-year-olds in CC; (2) children could generally utilize marked syntactic structures; a U-shaped development in use of passive structure was found between seven- and eleven-year-olds in CC; (3) when stress converged or competed with word order or syntactic structures, children responded nonuniformly; interaction effects are discussed in the light of the Competition model; (4) the development of processing strategies for Given and New interpretation varied as a function of context; (5) processing strategies varied across individuals, suggesting that there was heterogeneity of reliance on one type of information over another.