Chapter 10
Free choice and wh-indefinites in child Mandarin
The present study reports findings from experimental studies investigating Mandarin-speaking children’s knowledge of the free choice reading of existential expressions like wh-indefinites. Twenty-eight monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and twenty-two Mandarin-speaking adults participated in the study. Using a Question-Statement task (Zhou & Crain 2011), the present study found that four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children exhibited adult-like knowledge of the free choice reading of existential expressions. The current findings, in conjunction with the findings of previous research, provide evidence for a unified account of the semantic interpretations of existential expressions.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The present study
- 2.1Participants
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2.2Procedures
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2.3Materials
- 3.Results and discussion
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Acknowledgements
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Note
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References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Huang, Haiquan, Peng Zhou & Stephen Crain
2018.
Wh-Questions, Universal Statements and Free Choice Inferences in Child Mandarin.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 47:6
► pp. 1391 ff.
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