Acquisition Of The Scalar Particles Cai And Jiu In Mandarin

Scalar particles have long been a hot topic in the field of first language acquisition.Scalar particles,as a special type of focus particles always interact with a focused element and a set of ordered alternatives.The use of scalar particles in a sentence can induce a contextually pragmatic scale on which the focused element is placed on the end of the scale.Up to now,most of the current acquisition studies focus on the scalar reading of English scalar particles ‘even' and ‘even's' counterparts in various languages,but few studies concern the scalar particles in Mandarin.Cai and jiu in Mandarin are a pair of scalar particles with contrastive meanings.Cai is often related to lateness in time and largeness in quantity and jiu is associated with earliness in time and smallness in quantity.The use of cai/jiu in a sentence could highlight an element in a sentence and induce a set of ordered alternatives.The focus in cai contexts always ranks higher than other alternatives in the scale while the focus in jiu contexts ranks lower than other alternatives.The present research examined 4-to-6-year-old children's sensitivity to the scalar reading induced by cai/jiu,and discussed the tentative causes of children's difficulty in interpreting the scalar reading induced by cai/jiu.In addition,we explored if there are any differences between cai and jiu acquisition.60 participants between the age of 4-to-6 years old were selected from two kindergartens in Guangzhou.They were divided into four groups and took part in four experiments respectively.Experiments 1 and Experiment 2 adopted the methodology of a revised Truth Value Judgement task and a Question and Answer task,mainly testing children's sensitivity to cai and jiu in the time and quantity domain.Experiment 3 and Experiment 4 used two different methods called Comparing task and Guessing Who to examine children's sensitivity to cai and jiu in the ability domain.SPSS 19.0 was used to analyze the collected data.The results show that 4-6-yearold children are sensitive to the scalar reading induced by cai and jiu but they still do not achieve the adult-like performance.Experiment 1 shows that they did not reject the infelicitous statement with cai/jiu in a given context in the time and quantity domain,In Experiment 2,they could tell the scalar reading trigged by cai/jiu in some contexts in the time and quantity domain but their performance was still different from adults.Experiment 3 reflects that it was hard for them to compare the scale of focus and alternatives through the meaning of cai/jiu in the ability domain.However,in Experiment 4,their performance was largely enhanced with an explicit scale given.Most of the children could finish the Guessing Who task in the ability domain.The results indicate that the difficulties in their computation of the scalar reading might be the construction of the pragmatic scale,which also exists in children's interpretation of linguistic scales.The results reject previous accounts which suggest that children's failure in deriving scalar reading of cai/jiu is due to a lack of relevant knowledge.4-to-6-year-old children actually have the basic knowledge of cai/jiu,but only when the scale is explicitly given could they compute the scalar meaning.The findings support the Processing Limitation Hypothesis which assumes that if explicit alternatives in scale are given,children could compute scalar implicatures of scalar terms.It implies that children have similar difficulties in processing scalar reading triggered by scalar terms and scalar particles,which reflects a universal phenomenon in 4-to-6-year-old children's cognitive development.Meanwhile,by contrast with previous studies showing that children understand jiu better than cai,we found that children's performances in cai contexts are better than that in jiu contexts.The present study proposed a different account for children's difficulty in deriving the scalar reading induced by cai/jiu,which confirms the Processing Limitation Hypothesis.And it also provides some implications for the corpus research on children's acquisition of cai/jiu since the natural speeches of the scalar use of cai/ jiu are rarely collected.