A Study On The Acquisition Of Universal Quantifier Dou In Mandarin-speaking Children With SLI

The study of universal quantifier dou has been an important topic in linguistic inquiry.A substantial amount of research has been conducted to discover when and hownormal children acquire exhaustivity of universal quantifier dou and the scope relationbetween universal quantifier dou and negation. In addition, foreign studies haveshown that Specific Language Impairment (SLI) children have difficulties withquestion exhaustivity and logical meaning of universal quantifier every, indicatingthat SLI children may have deficits in semantics. However, to my knowledge, there isno published study on the acquisition of universal quantifier dou inMandarin-speaking SLI children. This study then investigates Mandarin-speaking SLIchildren’s acquisition of universal quantifier dou in two dimensions, exhaustivity ofuniversal quantifier dou and the scope relation between universal quantifier dou andnegation.The study includes36subjects from four cities, namely Hefei, Xinxiang,Changsha and Guangzhou. The subjects are divided into three groups: theexperimental group (SLI group) who was selected through standard languageproficiency tests, the Typically-Developing-Age-Matched (TDA) group who is of thesame age as SLI children and the Typically-Developing Younger (TDY) group who isyounger than SLI children but with the same language ability as SLI children. Thestudy consists of two experiments: one on exhaustivity of universal quantifier dou andthe other on scope assignment of universal quantifier dou and negation.SPSS16.0was applied to analyze the collected data. The results revealed thatSLI children had difficulty in acquiring exhaustivity as they failed to provide exhaustive answers in many cases but answered with a singleton or duality. Testresults also showed that SLI children had difficulty in capturing the correct scope ofuniversal quantifier dou and negation as they tended to accept the inverse readingbetween universal quantifier dou and negation.The current study provides a tentative analysis of SLI children’s difficulty inacquiring the universal quantifier dou. Regarding SLI children’s difficulty withexhaustivity of universal quantifier dou, the underlying cause may be that they failto realize that the quantification domain has to be exhausted, in other words, theyfail to acquire the universal quantifier property that underlies exhaustivity. SLIchildren’s difficulty with scope relation between universal quantifier dou andnegation is due to their lack of adult-like knowledge about the focus-sensitiveproperty of dou, which accounts for the scope rigidity in the sentence mei-pi ma doumeiyou tiaoguo liba ‘Every horse did not jump over the fence’.The current research provides preliminary information about the acquisition ofuniversal quantifier dou in Mandarin-speaking children with SLI. The researchresults show that SLI children demonstrate deficits in acquiring universal quantifierdou, which supports recent foreign studies indicating that SLI children may havedeficits in semantics. Hence, this finding is useful for diagnoses, prevention andtreatment of SLI children. In addition, the study may contribute to investigation ofother quantification structures in SLI children, such as restrictive and additive focus,and other quantifiers like some, so that a whole picture of SLI children’squantification competence can be provided and new insights into SLI children’sdeficits in semantics can be made available.