Do children know whanything? 3-year-olds know the ambiguity of wh-phrases in Mandarin

• Published in: Language acquisition Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 296 - 326
• Main Authors: Yang, Yu'an, Goodhue, Daniel, Hacquard, Valentine, Lidz, Jeffrey
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Mahwah Routledge 03-07-2022; Psychology Press
• Subjects: Children; Comprehension; English language; Imitation; Mandarin; Native language acquisition; Phrases; Prosody; Reference (Semantic); Sentences; Wh phrases
• ISSN: 1048-9223; 1532-7817
• DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2021.2020275

Wh-phrases in Mandarin have an interrogative (like English what) and an indefinite (like English a/some) interpretation. Previous comprehension studies find that children can access both interpretations around 4.5 years old; studies with younger children focus on production and find that children between 2 and 4.5 do not reliably produce the indefinite interpretation in naturalistic speech or in elicited imitation tasks. In this article, we use comprehension tasks to examine 3-year-olds' interpretation of wh-phrases. We find that they have adult-like interpretations of wh-phrases in two different contexts: in dou -sentences (Experiment 1), where the indefinite interpretation is the only available interpretation and the whole sentence receives a universal reading (roughly equivalent to English any), and in negated sentences (Experiment 2), where the interpretation of wh-phrases depends on prosodic prominence and the indefinite interpretation leads to an existential reading of the sentence.