An Experimental Study Of(In)definiteness Acquisition In Mandarin-Speaking Children

Children’s expressing of definite and indefinite referents in discourse constitutes an important aspect of their development of linguistic competence, for that they must not only acquire the morpho-syntactic forms for reference in their native language, but they must acquire pragmatic knowledge in which these linguistic forms are used. This research aims to explore how Mandarin-speaking children acquire such language devices, and to observe how pragmatic knowledge functions in the acquisition of definiteness and indefiniteness.The present study comprised two sets of experiments. A total of 150 Mandarin-speaking children as well as 20 adults were recruited for the experiments. Subjects for experiment 1 contained 80 children, aging from 4-year-old to 11-year-old, with each age group ten children. Subjects for experiment 2 involved 70 children aging from 5-year-old to 11-year-old, with each age group ten children as wel. Each experiment was tested with 3 sets of picture sequences. Experiment one primarily aimed to testify results of previous research, so that each picture sequence only consisted of two distinctly different characters and there was no contrast between protagonist and supporting role. In addition to the aim of duplicate test, experiment two mainly sought to determine whether yiclassifier NP was pragmatically different from numeral-classifier NP. Thus, another three sets of picture sequences were intentionally made in that one more character was added for each character. Therefore each picture comprised 4 characters and they would perform action in pairs. Each children was tested individually, and they were required to depict the picture sequences in collaboration with two experimenters in a context of ‘story-tel ing game’.Results of experiment one show that: 1. Children first acquire lexical device to refer to indefinite entities, and then follows the syntactic structure, whereas adults primarily use syntactic positions to express indefinite referents; 2. Children were inclined to put indefinite referents in the pre-verbal position of a sentence, which contrasted sharply with that of adults. 3. Definite referents are inclined to be in the position of subject and topic of a sentence. Among the available phrase types referring definite referents, bare noun is the main form. Experiment two have shown an extraordinarily different results concerning the acquisition of syntactic positions that children have acquired such a linguistic device to express indefinite referents at least in an age between 5-year-old and 6-year-old, and the proportion of post-verbal position occurred in children’s discourse was as much as in adults’. The phenomena were attributed to the setting of individual characters in experiment 1, as well as previous research, which gave rise to a mere usage of yi-classifier nominal phrase, rather than the usage of numeral-classifier nominal phrase. We hypothesized that the yi-classifier nominal phrase was semantical y corresponded to indefinite article in English, whereas numeral-classifier nominal phrase were deprived of the function to grammatical y mark indefinite referents, so that certain sentential structures were needed to mark an indefinite feature.The main conclusions are: 1. Mandarin-speaking children have acquired the linguistic devices(both lexical and syntactical) to distinguish between definite and indefinite referents in an early phase of development. The claim that the acquisition of lexical form preceded that of syntactic position is unconvincing. 2. Results of experiment two manifest that the acquisition of competence to make distinction between definite and indefinite expression, has been accomplished in early ages, whereas results in experiment one reported a developmental tendency of lexical form to syntactic form, with age increasing. This phenomenon may attribute to the hypothesis that children are inclined to comprehend yi-classifier as indefinite article, whereas numeral-classifier doesn’t possess such a semantic or pragmatic feature, so that certain syntactic structures(i.e., existential sentence) were employed to assign an indefinite feature to the nominal phrase.