A Studv Of Mandarin-speaking Children's Acquisition Of A-not-A Questions

This paper presents an experimental study investigating Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of A-not-A questions.A-not-A questions are one of the particular interrogatives in Chinese which include a positive part and a negative part.In this sentence type,either part can be chosen as the answer to A-not-A questions.Many researches show that wh-words in the object position of A-not-A questions can be indefinite(Li,1992;Lin,1996,1998).The longitudinal studies have shown that children acquire A-not-A questions later than other types of interrogatives(Guo,2016).At present there are few experimental studies on children's acquisition of A-not-A questions.This study includes three experiments.Experiment 1 aims to examine when children acquire A-not-A questions like Xiaoxiong mai-mei-mai dongxi?'Did the bear buy anything?'.The Imitation Task,the Elicited Production Task and the Question-answer Task were used.The results show that at least children from three years old became adult-like in their performance of A-not-A questions.Experiment 2 aims to examine whether children take a wh-word in the object position in the A-not-A question as its non-interrogative use as claimed in the literature.The Question-answer Task was also used.The results indicate that children like adults tended to answer the questions by taking the wh-word as its interrogative use.In order to further testify whether children consider shenme 'what' in the object position of A-not-A questions as interrogatives,sentences like Xiaoxiong shi-bu-shi mai-le shenme?'Is it the case that the bear buy anything?' were tested in Experiment 3.The Question-answer Task was applied in the experiment.The results show that both children and adults were sensitive to the bi-clausal structure of the test sentences though they did not demonstrate consistent responses to the test sentences.The present findings indicate that children starting from the age of three years acquire A-not-A questions and they tend to comprehend wh-words in the object positions of the A-not-A questions as interrogative use.