A Study On The Acquisition Of Modal Verbs By Mandarin-speaking Children

As an important linguistic topic,modal verbs have attracted extensive attention in both theoretical and acquisition studies.Numerous theoretical studies investigating modal verbs have been conducted by researchers from the perspectives of syntax,semantics and pragmatics.Besides,many acquisition studies in other languages than Chinese are also available.In comparison,literature on the acquisition of Chinese modal verbs is still needed.Therefore,based on previous studies,the present study intends to explore children’s early acquisition of different modal categories and their interpretation of ambiguous modal verbs.In this study,three experiments are designed and conducted to test the comprehension of Chinese modal verbs in four groups of children aged three to six.Two tasks,a truth-value judgment task(TVJT)and a picture-selection task,are employed to examine children’s performance.Two modal verbs are included in current research,which are yao ‘want,must,will’ and yinggai ‘should’.The following modal meanings of the two modal verbs are tested: yao ‘want,must,will’ used in volition context,obligation context and possibility context;yinggai ‘should’ used in obligation context and probability context.The results of these experiments and their explanation are presented as follows:1)The children who were three,four and five performed significantly better in comprehension of dynamic modals and deontic modals than that of epistemic modals.The children aged from four to six were at the ceiling in tasks containing dynamic modals and deontic modals.And for each modal meaning,the elder groups could perform better compared with the younger groups.This shows that the children have acquired both dynamic modality and deontic modality at three years old.Epistemic modals were the most difficult for the children.Therefore,it may be concluded that epistemic modals are acquired later than dynamic and deontic ones.This may be accounted for by the semantic and syntactic complexity of the modal system.2)The children preferred to interpret the ambiguous modal verb yinggai ‘should’in a neutral context in its deontic meaning.Through combining Tsai’s Modality Spectrum(2010)with the Derivational Complexity Metric(Jakubowics 2011),it could be learned that epistemic modal verbs require more complex derivations,which may be more difficult for the children when compared with deontic ones.Besides,the hypothesis of Premature Closure put forward by Acredolo & Horobin(1987)indicated that children tended to eliminate possible outcomes and prefer to endorse only one possibility in problems permitting more than one result.Therefore,it is reasonable for the children to endorse the easier deontic meaning of this ambiguous modal verb.Overall,the findings of this research have testified those of previous studies,that the development sequence of main modal categories are dynamic modals,followed by deontic modals and epistemic modals.Moreover,the current research also enriches,to some extent,literature on children’s acquisition of ambiguous Chinese modal verbs.