An Investigation Of The Restrictive Focus Jiu And Yige Substitution Interaction In Child Language Acquisition

The Subset Principle is a principle of learnability-one which provides the learner with an orderly procedure for positing hypotheses about the structure of the language. Recent work on the acquisition of semantics suggests that there is also semantic subset problem. A Semantic Subset Principle can be used to solve this problem. On the basis of positive evidence from the linguistic community, the children will converge on the target grammar so as to avoid the semantic subset problem. The previous researches (Crain et al.1994; Goro 2004; Gualmin& Moscati 2009; Mosacati 2007; Musolino 1998; Ozcelik 2009) have shown that Semantic Subset Principle is important in the language acquisition, especially for the ambiguous sentences in the language of English, Japanese, Italian and Turkish.Enlightened by the investigation in Crain et al. (1994), the paper reports a study that was carried out to investigate the Chinese children's understanding of sentences that are ambiguous for adults. For the test sentence with an interaction between focus operator Jiu and Yige substitution, the children tend to choose a subset reading, while the adults prefer the superset one. Employing the truth value judgment task, the present study tests thirty-five Chinese children, while the adult controls are interviewed in the null context, picture verification task and question-and-answer task. Based on the research, it is shown that children's interpretation of ambiguous sentences with the Jiu-Yige substitution interaction is in subset/superset relationship to the adults'. The results are consistent with the predictions of Semantic Subset Principle. The experiment for children of the present study adapts the similar approaches to Crain et al.'s. However, there is a development. The experimental approaches are based on Modularity Matching Model to add the pragmatic interferences. One is about context interference, and the other is about the intonation.According to fundament of Modularity Matching Model, the architecture of mind is modular. As a result, the adults adopt the minimal commitment component of the language apparatus-the parser to choose the superset interpretation, while the children adopt the maximal commitment LAD to choose the subset interpretation. In this paper, the experimental evidence is in agreement with Semantic Subset Principle.