A Study On Mandarin-speaking Children’s Acquisition Of Logical Connectives

The purposes of this study are to investigate Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of logical connectives and to find whether Mandarin-speaking children’s semantic interpretation of disjunction and conjunction conforms to classical logic or not.The experiment in this study was one part of the Diagnostic Receptive-Expressive Assessment of Mandarin-Chinese. The subjects in this experiment came from the kindergartens and primary schools in Tianjin and other provinces in China. There were altogether808children aged from30months (2;6) to83months (7;11) involved in the date analysis. Among them, there were63two and a half years old children (2;6:2;11),181three-year-old children (3;0:3;11),182four-year-old children (4;0:4;11),175five-year-old children (5;0:5;11),111six-year-old children (6;0:6;11) and96seven-year-old children (7;0:7;11). A control group consisted of45undergraduate students from a university in Tianjin.We applied the method of Picture-Selection Task to investigate the children’s acquisition of the logical connectives. There were nine Picture-Selection tasks, four tasks about the conjunction he, three tasks about disjunction huozhe/haishi and two tasks about both the conjunction he and disjunction haishi.The results show that there is a noticeable increase about the percentage of correct responses to the logical connectives when children are around four years old. Chinese adults’and children’s interpretations of disjunction huozhe correspond to classical logic. Children have the+PPI parameter of conjunction he taking scope over negation in negated conjunction Neg...he according to the Semantic Subset Principle. Hence, the de Morgan cannot be applied in Chinese negated conjunction. And children’s computational system of logical connectives develops with the time. Due to the time limitation, there are still some problems in this research. Therefore, it needs to be improved again. In conclusion, we hope our findings may provide the cross-linguistic evidence for the innateness of logical operators.