A Study On Chinese Quantifier Scope Ambiguity And L1 Acquisition

Quantifiers in natural language settings have their scope. The liner of the quantifiers is not sufficient to determine the quantifiers’ scope in the sentence that contains more than one quantifier. Therefore these sentences may have quantifier scope.Based on this point, the article uses the truth value judgment task and picture identification task to investigate Chinese children’s comprehension of doubly quantified ambiguous sentences. We will make an analysis and comparison between ways of interpretation of Chinese children and adults and do credit to the Observation of Isomorphism and Continuity Hypotheses. The conclusions are as follows:First, both Chinese children aged from 4 to 6 and adults can reach the two interpretations of the doubly quantified sentences. In other words, children and adult comprehend these sentences in the same way. The result supports the Continuity Hypothesis. And we also can reach a conclusion that different from English children,Chinese children are not observed the Observation of Isomorphism in reading doubly quantified sentences.Second, Chinese children aged from 4 to 6 and adults have different reading bias in comprehending doubly quantified sentences. Children prefer surface scope reading while adult choose inverse scope more. The result reveals that children aged 6 did not master the semantic entailment relationship between the two interpretations.