L1Acquisition Of The Universal Quantifier Dou In Mandarin Chinese

As a universal quantifier, dou quantifies the plural element to its left. Wh-words inChinese can also be quantified by dou. But when it happens, the wh-words are no longerinterrogative. And the sentence becomes a statement rather than a question. On the other hand,when the wh-words follow dou, they remain interrogative and the sentence is a wh-question.If a sentence with dou contain a plural subject and there is a wh-word that follows dou, thenthe sentence must be ambiguous. The plural subject meets the plural requirement ofdou-quantification. Meanwhile, from the perspective of focus structure, the wh-wordfollowing dou is the focus phrase which introduces new information of the sentence and itrelates to the focus particle dou. According to Principle of Economy, the quantitiverequirement of dou can be satisfied with only one quantified object.On the basis of the point stated above, an experiment with Question-Statement Task (inthe first experiment) was made to explore whether Mandarin-speaking children know that douquantifies the preceding plural expression including wh-words. Another experiment was madewith Wh-question method to explore whether Mandarin-speaking can resolve ambiguities ofsentence with dou in which there is a plural subject and a wh-word object occur at the sametime. We use the statistical software SPSS to analyze our experimental data.The results from experiment1show that Mandarin-speaking children aged4-6years olddo interpret dou as a universal quantifier, which is consistent with the previous investigators’findings (Lee1986; Hsieh2008；Zhou and Crain2011). Meanwhile, through our ownexperiment, we found that most of the children aged3-4years old tend to ignore dou. They didnot know that those sentence with wh-words preceding dou are statement. Instead, theyinterpreted those statements as questions. There is no obvious age difference among childrenfrom4to6years old. Because some children aged4-6years old also interpreted the teststatement as question as the most children aged3-4years old did. Although those childrenmisunderstand the test sentence temporarily, it does not necessarily mean that they areshortage of the knowledge of dou quantification. Children just need more contact of relevantcorpus about the universal quantifier dou in order to support them to make choice correctly.The results from the second experiment show that Mandarin-speaking children can resolve the ambiguities of sentence containing dou. This finding is inconsistent with results ofthe former studies on children resolving ambiguities of sentence in other foreign languages.Besides, children’s comprehension of sentence with a pitch accent on dou enhances with theincrease of the age. This finding further proves that Mandarin-speaking children know thatdou quantifies the left plural element. On the other hand, children’s comprehension of thesame sentence with a pitch accent on the wh-word is inconsistent with the age. Because thereare three children aged4-5years old and also three children aged5-6years old failed torespond to the test sentence. They interpreted the sentence as having a pitch accent on dou. Interms of this finding, we propose that the children’s language input and their differentgrowing surroundings play a important part in their language acquisition.As for how the children overcome the learnability problem of the universal quantifierdou and finally converge on the adult grammar, we followed Zhou (2011)’s proposal, whostated that children are born with a variable-binding mechanism which will help children getthe right interpretation in specific linguistic context. They just need to acquire the differentsemantic properties of these linguistic environments. Children’s success in resolving theambiguities of sentence containing dou results from the firmly established mapping betweenthe prosody and syntax in their language.