Mandarin Speaking Children's Acquisition Of Individual Classifiers And Count-Mass Distinction

This thesis investigates Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of the individual classifiers and the count-mass distinction.Chinese is a classifier language in which the role of the classifiers is very important.Following Bore(2005),we assume that the bare nouns in Chinese are unspecified in number and individuation and the individual representation of the bare nouns is realized via the numeral classifier system.Individual classifiers have two properties.One is individuality and the other is quantification.The property of individuality is to distinguish the countable nouns from the mass nouns.Countable nouns like pingguo 'apple' can be individualized while mass nouns like shui 'water' cannot.Therefore,the individuality is a property of the individual classifiers.On the other hand,an individual classifier requires that an object be in its wholeness.Quantification is another property of the individual classifiers.That is,the default interpretation of individual classifiers in the absence of numerals is "one".In this thesis,two experiments have been conducted.Experiment 1 examines 4-,5-and 6-year-old children's acquisition of the individual classifiers using the picture verification task.The individual classifiers used in the experiment are ge,zhi,tiao and ba.In order to investigate the children's understanding of the individual classifiers.four conditions are designed:the whole condition(e.g.,an whole apple).the almost whole condition(e.g.,an apple with a bite),the half condition(e.g.,half an apple),and the multiple condition(e.g.,three apples).There are two types of test sentences:one with the individual classifiers and the other without them.In the sentences with individual classifiers,the noun is preceded by an individual classifier and in the sentences without individual classifiers,the noun is in bare form.The results show that the 6-year-old children demonstrate adult-like understanding of these individual classifiers.They accepted all test sentences with bare nouns under the four conditions.They accepted the sentences with classifiers under the whole and almost whole conditions while refusing them under the half and multiple conditions.The discrepancies between children's responses to the sentences with and without the individual classifiers indicate that the relevant classifies help children demonstrate their knowledge of the individuation and quantification of the bare nouns.Experiment 2 examines the 3-,4-and 5-year-old children's acquisition of the count-mass distinction using the elicited production task.In order to explore children's count-mass distinction in Chinese,two conditions are designed:the full condition(e.g.,a full bowl of cherries)and the non-full condition(e.g.,two cherries in a bowl).There are two kinds of nouns:countable nouns(e.g.,yingtao 'cherries')and uncountable nouns(e.g.,shui 'water').The results show that the 5-year-old children made an adult-like distinction between the countable nouns and the mass nouns.They used individual classifiers to express the quantity of countable nouns and used massifiers(e.g.,containers)to express the quantity of mass nouns.The results indicate that children at that age can make a count-mass distinction by making use of the individual classifiers and container classifiers.We draw a conclusion from the present findings that children first make a distinction between countable nouns and mass nouns.Then they come to understand the individuation and quantification of the countable nouns under the help of the individual classifiers.