Mandarin-speaking Children’s Acquisition Of Donkey Sentences

This study aims to investigate Mandarin-speaking children’s interpretation of the donkey sentences. Specifically, this study examines (1) whether there is a distinction between the bare conditional donkey sentences without ruguo ’if’ and those with it as claimed in the literature;(2) whether the existential reading of the donkey sentences is allowed in Chinese as in English; and (3) whether the syntactic distribution of the wh-words in the donkey sentences affects children’s interpretation of such kind of sentences.Truth Value Judgment Task was adopted to assess children’s interpretation of the donkey sentences in this study. The subjects consisted of sixty children (from3;0to6;0, with a mean age of4;6) and ten adults. The test sentences included two types of donkey sentences:bare conditionals and ruguo-conditionals. Each type had four subtypes of donkey sentences:(1) sentences with the wh-words in the subject positions of both main and conditional clauses (SS);(2) sentences with the wh-words in the object positions of both main and conditional clauses (OO);(3) sentences with one wh-word in the subject position of the conditional clause and the other in the object position of the main clause (SO);(4) sentences with one wh-word in the object position of the conditional clause and the other in the subject position of the main clause (OS). The test sentences were tested in two types of contexts:one favoring the universal reading whereas the other favoring the existential reading. The main findings are as follows:(1) both children and adults treated the bare conditionals and ruguo-conditionals alike;(2) while adults only accepted the universal reading of the donkey sentences, younger children accepted both universal and existential readings;(3) after the age of five, children performed adult-like preference for the universal reading of the donkey sentences;(4) generally speaking, the distribution of the wh-words had no significant effect on children’s understanding of the donkey sentences. The findings indicate that:(1) the two types of donkey sentences can be interpreted in a similar way;(2) while English donkey sentences allow both universal reading and existential reading, Chinese donkey sentences only allow the former, but not the latter;(3) the syntactic distribution of the wh-words in the donkey sentences has little effect on the interpretation of the donkey sentences.