| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 106 === The present study investigated children’s first language acquisition of donkey sentences and bare conditionals in Mandarin Chinese, which are both concerned with quantification. Aiming to discover a developmental pattern of acquisition, this study explored children’s knowledge of quantification and how each construction affects their readings by testing their interpretations of the two constructions from an empirical perspective. Four issues regarding the two constructions were taken into account, which were the construction-related factor, construction-specific factors, contextual effects, and age effects. Kindergarten, Grade 2 and Grade 4 were recruited as experimental groups, and adults as a control group to compare their interpretations, each of which consisted of eighteen subjects. Every subject finished two phases of tasks, which were sentences in isolation and sentences in context. In both phases of the experiments, the subjects were asked to determine which picture best described the target sentence to test their interpretation, a universal or existential reading.
The results of this research identified a developmental pattern of the acquisition of donkey sentences and bare conditionals in Mandarin Chinese. It was found that overally, children under seven years old had difficulty interpreting quantificational sentences. First, concerning the relatedness of the two constructions, all the four groups showed a unanimous tendency in that bare conditionals were not in the same vein to donkey sentences in terms of interpretations where the latter was easier to interpret. In addition, quantifier types of donkey sentences are vital to interpretations, where the quantifier mei ‘every’ was already acquired by children as young as KS, bushi meige ‘not every’ was interpreted in an adult-like manner by Grade 2, and youxie ‘some’ could not be obtained with an adult-like interpretation by any child group. This showed that mei ‘every’ was the easiest to acquire, followed by bushi meige ‘not every’ and lastly youxie ‘some.’ Another construction-specific factor, parallelism, was identified crucial to readings where all the child groups exhibited adult-like interpretations of parallel bare conditionals, but only Grade 2 and Grade 4 could have interpretations in an adult-like manner of nonparallel ones. This indicated that nonparallel sentences were more challenging to interpret than nonparallel ones. Moreover, with respect to contextual effects, children by the stage of Grade 2 could obtain adult-like interpretations of donkey sentences in biasing context, but it was not until they were at Grade 4 could they interpret both donkey sentences and bare conditionals in supporting context with adult-like readings. As a result, contextual effects were found, and the subjects’ interpretations were greatly affected by context but in different ways to the two constructions.
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