The Acquisition Of Negative Sentences In Preschool Mandarin-speaking Children

Negation is of vital importance in children’s language system.Children’s acquisition of negation is a hot topic and has received great attention in the field of language acquisition.However,negation acquisition has been studied for many years,but it still has large domain to be explored.This study aims to investigate preschool Mandarinspeaking children’s negation acquisition to understand their developmental trajectory of negation comprehension and to explore the effects of vocabulary size and working memory on negation acquisition.To achieve these goals,the study carried out a corpus-assisted study and two experimental studies(Experiment 1 and Experiment 2).The corpus-assisted study drew upon Child Language Data Exchange System(CHILDES)to investigate the distribution characteristics of four negative markers(bu "no",meiyou "not",no,not)in children’s natural speech.The two experimental studies adopted the same method to investigate preschool Mandarin-speaking children’s negation comprehension.Experiment 1,as a cross-sectional study,used a Truth-Value Judgement Task to test 91 preschool Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of affirmative and negative sentences.Experiment 2,as a follow-up study,was carried out after the time interval of 1 year and 6 months and tested 24 out of 91 children recruited in Experiment 1.At the same time,in both experiments,children’s vocabulary size and working memory were examined to further investigate whether there was any correlation between linguisticcognitive abilities and negation comprehension.Descriptive analyses were used in the corpus-assisted study.Descriptive analyses and statistical analyses were carried out on the data of two experimental studies.The comprehensive analyses revealed the comprehension characteristics of the four conditions of negative sentences for children aged 4 to 6 and the relationship between linguistic-cognitive abilities and negation comprehension in the critical period of children’s language development.The main findings are as follows.First,for the three age groups,negative sentences are more difficult to comprehend compared with affirmative sentences.Second,among the four condition,True Negative is the most difficult condition for preschool Mandarin-speaking children.The two findings are in line with the prediction of the Two-Step Simulation Hypothesis.Third,preschool Mandarin-speaking children have not fully mastered the negative notion——"denial"(truth-value function)which demonstrates that the acquisition of negative notion and negative markers are a gradual process.Fourth,after the time interval,children have improved their performance on negation comprehension.However,the difficulties in the first and second findings still exist.Fifth,there is no significant correlation between vocabulary size and negation comprehension.And working memory only plays a role in negation comprehension at the later age.The study has demonstrated that the Two-Step Simulation Hypothesis holds the validity in preschool Mandarin-speaking children’s negation comprehension.And the study has observed children’s developmental trajectory and development difficulties in negation acquisition.The study has contributed to the research of negation and has also provided pedagogical implications for preschool Mandarin-speaking children’s negation acquisition.