Child Language Acquisition Of Non-interrogative Wh-words In Mandarin Chinese

Over the last forty years, researchers abroad and in China have approached the non-interrogative wh-words in Mandarin Chinese from a great variety of angles. In theory, studies conducted in the aspect of modern formal linguistics have revealed that similarities in syntactic distribution are shared by non-interrogative wh-words in Mandarin Chinese and negative polarity items (NPIs). Wh-words in Mandarin Chinese possess polarity sensitivity and exhibit non-interrogative interpretation under the restrictions of certain licensing environments. With regard to this issue in language acquisition, great attention has been paid to the investigations on licensors and semantic comprehension of the non-interrogative reading among children and adults in first and second language acquisition. The findings show that3-to5-year old children are sensitive to the licensing conditions for the non-interrogative interpretation, and understand the existential reference and nonspecific reference of wh-words in Mandarin Chinese.Although some achievements have been obtained based on the wide investigations; the exploration on child acquisition still needs further improvements. First of all, scholars adhere to their own view on classifications of the non-interrogative wh-words in Mandarin Chinese, but with regard to the most essential property of non-interrogative use, scholars has not come to an agreement yet. Secondly, studies on non-interrogative wh-words in Mandarin Chinese mostly concentrate on adults’ second language acquisition, while just a few studies refer to children’s first language acquisition. In addition, results in second language acquisition have shown that there exists a difficulty order in the acquisition of the licensing conditions, but whether the same case appears in the child acquisition is unclear at present. Thirdly, previous researches mainly focus on the analysis of3-to5-year-old children’s performances and ignore the condition of the older children above5years old. Besides, the testing method by age groups is absent, which fails to illustrate the discrepancy in children at different ages and account for children’s longitudinal development in the acquisition process of this issue. Therefore, more detailed studies should be carried out concerning the child language acquisition of non-interrogative wh-words in Mandarin Chinese.In order to overcome the deficiencies in previous researches, the present study, based on the related findings, probe into the child language acquisition of non-interrogative wh-words, and observe the differences between children’s initial state and adults’ grammar. The present study is an empirical study which adopts the Truth Value Judgment Tasks (TVJT).48children aged3to7years old from the kindergarten at Beijing Forestry University participate in the experiment, all of whom are divided into four age groups with12children in each group. Besides,12adults from Beijing Forestry University are selected as the control group. By means of PASW Statistics18.0, data from all subjects are processed and analyzed via analysis of variance (ANOVA).The findings indicate that children’s performance is much closer to the steady state of adults as their ages increase. In the3-to5-year-old period, children are aware of the semantic differences of wh-words in various contexts, and children aged5-to7-year-old have possessed the non-interrogative use of wh-words in distinct licensing contexts, displaying no difference with the adults. In addition, the present study finds out that there exists a difficulty order in the acquisition process. The licensing environment for non-interrogative interpretation that is acquired earlier is the negative context, and then the affirmative context; the non-interrogative use in uncertain contexts is acquired later.Combining the studies on theory and language acquisition together, this research makes an attempt to look into the essential property of non-interrogative wh-words in Mandarin Chinese and children’s early acquisition. At the same time, the findings show great support for the governing mechanism of Universal Grammar (UG) in the whole process of language acquisition, which deepens and extends out perception of language development.