Chinese Children's Knowledge Of The Scope Interaction Of Quantifier And Negation

The research on quantifier scope ambiguity has been a hot issue in linguistics. Quantifier and negation interact with each other to produce scope ambiguity. Based on this point, three investigations with the picture verification method and the truth value judgment task were conducted to account for Chinese children's interpretation through the comparison between adults and children. Mei-pi ma dou mei-you tiao - guo liba every-CL horse all not-have jump-over fence Every horse didn't jump over the fenceAccording to the current literature, the Chinese quantified sentences like the above are unambiguous in adult grammar, which can only be interpreted as"none of the horses jump over the fence"(isomorphic interpretation), contrary to children's interpretation and their ambiguous English counterparts, which also allow the interpretation that"some, not all of the horses jumped over the fence"(non-isomorphic interpretation).The present research includes two sentence types: sentence type 1,"mei CL N dou bu VP (every NP not V N)"; sentences type 2,"bushi mei CL N dou VP (not every NP V N)". Specifically, two questions were examined: (i) Whether or not Chinese-speaking children have adult-like knowledge of the restrictions on the interpretation of quantified sentences like the above, which are unambiguous for adults. (ii) If they do have the adult-like knowledge, it is in accordance with the Continuity Hypothesis. If not, how to resolve the learnability problem (or what is the inner mechanism for children to converge on the adult grammar).The results (from Experiment 1 and Experiment 2) showed that both the adults and children accept its isomorphic and non-isomorphic interpretation, but adults always have the preference for the isomorphic interpretation as children do in sentence type 1. However, children have no preference in sentence type 2 by accepting both of the two interpretations. Experiment 3 aims to study the reason for children's preference for isomorphic interpretation, which is attributable to their failure to compute scalar implicature. Our data are consistent with this point of view of Musolino (2002/2006) and also coincident with the results in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. From these researches, we come to the conclusion that children behave differently with the adults in interpreting quantified sentences like the above. The reasons for the differences are justifiable. On the one hand, children can access both of the interpretations. Adults also have two interpretations to the sentences in our tests, but they just prefer to isomorphic interpretation more because Chinese special sentence pattern cause them to have a default preference for this interpretation. Children prefer to the isomorphic interpretation because of their failure in scalar implicature. This is a big different point we got from the experiments, which is greatly different from the previous theoretical linguistists'view that Chinese always view these sentences unambiguously. On the other hand, only when children acquire the usage of the focus-sensitive operators like"shi"(be), they would overcome the learnability problem and naturally converge on the adult grammar.