ABSTRACT

This study reports findings from two truth value judgment experiments to address two research questions on Mandarin: (i) whether children and adults have the knowledge of the structural constraint Principle C in their pronoun resolution; and (ii) whether adults and children show the prohibition effect of the cyclic-c-command constraint or the QR account of pronouns on the coreference reading of backward anaphora for different types of subordinate clauses. The results show that children pattern similarly to adults for their interpretation of the Principle C sentences. For backward anaphora sentences, adults disallow the coreference reading for the deshihou ‘while/when’ clause but accept it for the yinwei ‘because’ clause, contrary to the predictions of the cyclic-c-command account and the QR account. However, children allow coreference for both types of clauses. The pattern from Mandarin-acquiring children is in line with previous studies on English, Italian, and Russian, which demonstrate that children respect a language-universal structural constraint (i.e., Principle C) at the initial stage of development, with the language-specific or even construction-specific constraint being acquired later.

摘要

这项研究报告了来自两个真值判断实验的结果，以解决关于普通话的两个研究问题：（i）儿童和成人是否在代词解析中了解结构约束原则C；（ii）成人和儿童对不同类型的从句的反照应性的共同参照读音是否表现出循环c命令约束或代词QR记述的禁止作用。结果表明，儿童对C原则句子的解释与成人相似。对于向后的回指句子，成人禁止对deshihou的“ while / when”子句使用共指阅读，但对于音译则接受'because'子句，与循环c命令帐户和QR帐户的预测相反。但是，子级允许同时引用这两种类型的子句。来自获得普通话的孩子的模式与先前对英语，意大利语和俄语的研究相吻合，这些研究表明，儿童在发展的初始阶段尊重语言通用的结构性约束（即原则C），并且要针对特定​​语言甚至是以后要获取的特定于施工的约束。