The Acquisition Of Pronouns By Mandarin-speaking Children

Personal pronouns, which are with relatively referential interpretation, require speakersto adjust the speech role of reference (speaker, listener and others) in accordance with thediscourse. In order to correctly understand and use personal pronouns, children have to makea complex linguistic and cognitive calculation. In this study, we try to describe the process ofpronoun acquisition by Chinese-speaking children through corpus analysis. In addition, threeexperiments with Act-out task and Picture Verification taskwere conducted to investigatechildren’s knowledge of Principle B, which accounts for reference resolution of pronouns.The analysis of naturalistic corpus data shows: children began using the first and secondpersonal pronouns at the age of20months, and gradually produced the third personalpronouns after the age of32months. The acquisition order is wo3≤ni3<wo3ziji <ta1<ni3ziji <wo3men <ta1men <ni3men <wo3men zij <ta1men ziji (“<” stands for “before”),withwo3(“I”) and ni3(“you”) appearing almost at the same time. However, wo3(“I”) and ni3(“you”) pronoun-reversing phenomenon existed in children’s early age. Thus, we assume thatthe acquisition of wo3(“I”) is earlier than ni3(“you”). As for the frequency of pronoun uses,the first personal pronoun is used much more frequently than other pronouns. There is asignificant difference among personal pronouns in different syntactic positions in frequency.Besides, children show a tendency of using more pronouns in the subject position.Whether it is finite or nonfinite clause, results from experiment1and2showed that mostchildren above5;0will choose the non-locally commanding antecedent for a pronoun innon-quantificational sentence regardless of clause patterns. On the contrary, children tended tochoose the long-distance binding antecedent in reflexive test sentences. Experiment3isdesigned to investigate children’s knowledge of Principle B with quantificational antecedent.Sentence such as Mei-ge Xiongmao dou zai qingli ta shenshang-de zhou (“Every panda iscleaning the porridge in his body”) is ambiguous. It can be interpreted as “There is a panda xthat every panda y is cleaning x”(Non-coindexed and non-bound variable). It also can beinterpreted as “For panda x, panda x is cleaning panda x”(Coindexed and bound variable)according to Principle B. Our results suggest, children tend to accept the second reading,which violates Principle B by making pronoun coindex with the subject. However, mostchildren make correct responses to referential sentences, which reconfirm the results fromprevious experiments and offers evidence that QA exists in Chinese-speaking children’sacquisition of pronouns. From our perspective, the specific Chinese construction leadschildren to make a long-distance interpretation of pronoun and reflexive. On the other hand, from our investigation of a corpus consisting of147,677utterances, it is possible that childrenranging from14months to72months have not acquired the semantic meaning of quantifiers.The quantifier mei (“every”) only occurs three times, so that they cannot correctly judge thequantificational test sentences. Children make the coreferential interpretation forquantificational sentences under the effect of certain particular context. The points drawingfrom our research are different from the previous researchers, but are consistent with thelinguistic theory that children will obey Principle B.