The Study Of Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers' Acquisition Of Focus Particle Dou

The semantics and pragmatics of dou have been a hot topic of theoretic linguistics for many years.Although the dispute as to whether dou renders a unitary semantic interpretation or a polysemous account has not been settled,it is clear that universal quantification and scalar interpretation are two dominant uses of dou.Previous acquisition studies on dou have mainly focused on its universal quantification reading,and it has been found that Mandarin-speaking preschool children have the adult-like knowledge of dou as a universal quantifier when they are up to four years old.Nevertheless,the acquisition of dou as a scalar additive particle remains understudied.Sixty preschool children were recruited from two kindergartens in Guangzhou,who were divided into four groups and treated with different experimental conditions.Experiment One was designed to test preschool children's overall performance in comprehending sentences with dou,which found that children did not have the adult-like knowledge of dou's scalar reading.In order to see whether an explicit scale in context and the presence of focus marker lian could enhance children's sensitivity to the scalar reading triggered by dou,Experiment Two and Experiment Three were designed.Serving as a supplementary experiment to Experiment Two and Experiment Three,Experiment Four was designed to test children's performance when they were provided with the explicit presence of a scale and lian in one task.In addition,15non-linguistics majors were recruited from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies as the control group,who were required to fulfill the same language tasks in the four experiments.The data collected was analyzed by calculating the rate of correct responses.The results reveal that Mandarin-speaking preschool children do not have the complete knowledge of dou.They do have the adult-like knowledge of dou's quantification use but they do not acquire the adult-like knowledge of dou's scalar reading.When noscale is present in the context,they fail to derive the scalar reading triggered by dou and only comprehend the truth-conditional meaning of test sentences.However,when a contextual scale is provided,their sensitivity to dou's scalar reading is significantly enhanced.Therefore,we may say that preschool children have the prerequisite knowledge of dou's scalar reading which is only evoked when a scale is provided.In addition,the present study also finds that the presence of focus marker lian does not enhance children's sensitivity to dou's scalar reading.The present study provides a tentative analysis of Mandarin-speaking preschool children's non-adult-like reading of sentences with dou.As the child subjects only display their sensitivity to dou's scalar reading when an explicit scale is present in the context,we assume that their failure in deriving the scalar reading is due to their inability to construct an ordered alternative set.This idea is consistent with previous assumption on children's failure in generating scalar implicature.In addition,the presence of lian does not help children to enhance their sensitivity,which may indicate that a marked position of the focused element does not help children to invoke the alternative set in mind.The present study helps us to recognize the genuine language competence of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers,which replenishes previous literature on children's comprehension of sentences with dou.Moreover,it could provide language evidence for the research of cognitive development because language development is in line with cognitive development.Furthermore,by revealing children's comprehension of scalar additive particle dou,it is feasible to relate the present study to research on other scalar additive particles.