A Study On Mandarin-speaking Children’s Comprehension Of Universal Quantified Negation Sentences

The purpose of this study is to investigate Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of quantified negation sentences. We apply the method of Truth Value Judgment Task throughout the test, which was developed in Crain and McKee (1985) and Crain and Thornton (1998). By using the statistical software SPSS and Winsteps, we assess whether our data is normally distributed and check whether the whole test has a high reliability and validity. Then we divide our participants into different groups according to their age, and do some comparative analyses among age groups and different sentence structures.The subjects are125preschool children from Shenyang, Liaoning Province and the range of age is from2;9to7;1,(with a mean age of4;6). They are divided into three age groups. The adult group includes63sophomores from Tianjin Normal University.We have classified all the23test items into two broad classes:Neg-UQNP and Neg-UQNP-EQNP, each being further divided into two subclasses as follows.Neg-UQNP:Universal quantifier preceding negation Negation preceding universal quantifierNeg-UQNP-EQNP:Double object construction Canonical constructionsThe result shows that children have a better understanding of Neg-UQNP sentences than Neg-UQNP-EQNP sentences. Moreover, children above the age of4already demonstrate adult-like interpretation of sentences with universal quantifier preceding negation, whereas they can not perform adult-likely on the other3sentence patterns even when they are at the age of6.In the end of this paper, the author concludes that children’s ability of interacting syntax and semantics together in sentence interpretation develops along with time, younger children tend to demonstrate isomorphic interpretations.