Mandarin-speaking Children's Acquisition Of Chinese Pronouns

Binding Theory is widely presumed to be part of the Universal Grammar(Thornton & Wexler,1999).Principle B of the binding theory specifies that a pronoun cannot be bound within its governing category(Chomsky,1981).This principle is regarded as innate and children will observe the Principle in their interpretation of pronouns.However,over the past thirty years,related child language acquisition studies have got some inconsistent results.On the one hand,many studies report that English-speaking children aged from four to six violate Principle B in their interpretation of English pronouns.Specifically speaking,many English-speaking children coindex the pronoun with the local antecedent,which means they misinterpret the pronoun as the reflexive,which is termed as the Delay of Principle B Effect(the DPBE)(Chien & Wexler,1990 among others);but when the antecedent is quantified,children will no longer have the Principle B violation interpretation,which is termed as the Quantificational Asymmetry(the QA)(Elbourne,2005).Although it is widely acknowledged that English-speaking children exhibit the DPBE and the QA in their acquisition of pronouns,some studies argue that English-speaking children do not demonstrate the DPBE or the QA in their interpretation of pronouns through using the improved experimental design(Conroy et al.,2009).Moreover,Chinese-speaking children's acquisition of pronouns also has the inconsistency.Hao,Sheng and Gao(2014)report that Chinese-speaking children do not show the DPBE or the QA in their interpretation of pronouns but Chien and Wexler(1987b)find that Chinese-speaking children exhibit the DPBE when they interpret pronouns.Based on the inconsistency on children's acquisition of pronouns,the present study designs two experiments to test thirty 4-to-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of pronouns using the truth value judgment task.Experiment one and experiment two aim to investigate whether four to five years' old Mandarin-speaking children show the DPBE and the QA respectively.Besides,the present study also tests thirty adults as the control group.All the target subjects speak Mandarin Chinese as their mother language.The present study's data show that Mandarin-speaking children aged from four to five do not demonstrate the DPBE orthe QA in their interpretation of pronouns.The experimental results are in line with Hao,Sheng and Gao's(2014),which all provide empirical support for Chomsky's(1981)binding theory.And those findings lend support to Chomsky's Innateness Hypothesis,which specifies that children's language acquisition depends on the internal language acquisition device but not the external language environment.What's more,the present study will also discuss the reasons for the discrepancies of the acquisition of pronouns between English and Chinese.