A Study Of The Double Negative Understanding Ability Of Chinese Mandarin Children

Double negation is a linguistic phenomenon that contains two negative components, leading to affirmative meaning after the negation of negation. Some researchers divide double negation into sematic double negation and pragmatic double negation, and maintain that pragmatic double negation is harder to understand than the other one according to context correlation. Is there any sequence on the understanding of different double negation? Through the'‘??X?Y”“??? X""??X" and "???(?)…?”,this paper investigates the appropriate age of Mandarin Chinese children's understanding of double negative structure, then it analyses the sequence of the four structures and discusses the reasons of the order.This paper chooses three age groups (4-5,5-6,6-7), with fifteen boys and girls in each group. It investigates children's understanding of the four double negative structures with truth value judgment, with a result that the development track is significant:5 to 6 children have already understood the meaning of "??X";6 to 7 children can comprehend "??X?Y”and'‘???(?)…?”,but for“???X", the development of children's understanding accuracy rate is relative slow, they fail to understand the basic meaning until 6 to 7. The sequence of the four double negative structures is as follows???X<???(?)…?<??X?Y<??X. Semantic and pragmatic double negation are interleaved in order, the former one isn't easier to understand than the latter one. There is no gender difference in the aspect of understanding double negation for the children of the same age, and the comprehension level between boys and girls is similar.The development of children's understanding of double negation is complex; the age of understanding double negation is different due to the specific double negative structure. Children can master the meaning of "??X”early mainly because it conforms to the prototype features of double negation, the logic conversion is simple, the imperative meaning is closely related to children's lives, and children are vulnerable to the role of session; While children fail to understand'‘???X”until 6 to 7, which mainly associates with its complex structure and modality,“?”have polysemy and the modality is too abstract to determine, besides the modal strength changes in the complex logic transformation; "??X?Y”can be understood by visual things, whereas its logic conversion is more complex than“??X”?“???(?)…?”has the characteristics of sematic implication, children can comprehend it till 6 to 7 may because children cannot understand rhetorical tone and its negative function, and cannot deduce the implicit assertion. There is no gender difference with regard to the comprehension of double negation because the children accept the same education and have a common language environment thus their cognitive ability is parallel, and the physiological basis for the development of language may not significantly different after 4.In one word, the age and the sequence that children can understand double negation varies with specific structures, but semantic double negation and pragmatic double negation are not sequential in terms of comprehension.