Chapter published in:
Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In honor of Stephen Crain
Edited by Mineharu Nakayama, Yi-ching Su and Aijun Huang
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 60] 2017
► pp. 223–235

Free choice and wh-indefinites in child Mandarin

| Tsinghua University
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.
Published online: 24 August 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.60.11zho
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Cited by other publications

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. Crossref logo

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