| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 103 === The present study focuses on the dou and lian…dou constructions in Chinese. It aims to investigate Chinese-speaking children’s understanding of the two constructions by examining five factors: the plurality constraint, the locality constraint, distributivity, presuppositions, and age. Two comprehension tasks (i.e., grammaticality judgment and interpretation) were conducted and both of them were presented in a designed story scenario. The subjects were sixty-eighty children from the kindergarten and elementary school in Taiwan, and they were further divided into four groups according to their ages (i.e., 4 year-olds to 7-year-olds). Also, seventeen college students whose mother tongue were Chinese were recruited as the Adult Group.
The results showed that the dou construction was easier to acquire than the lian…dou construction. The plurality constraint was confirmed to govern the dou construction, and the locality constraint was observed in both the dou and the lian…dou constructions. Besides, the results indicated that the subjects’ comprehension of distributive readings in the dou construction and their interpretation of presuppositions in the lian…dou construction increased with age. The age factor was found to be crucial. Our children at the age of 4 to 6 were able to comprehend the plurality and locality constraints although their performances were still not adult-like. The 7 year-old subjects were found to perform adult-like in that they could comprehend the two constraints, and distributivity of the dou construction and also presuppositions of the lian…dou construction.
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