普通话儿童等级含义的习得

Mandarin-speaking Children’s Acquisition of Scalar Implicatures

为探究儿童计算等级含义的内在机制,从而找出其计算等级含义困难的真正原因,采用组内设计,用图片验证任务做了两个实验。实验一考察学前普通话儿童在不提供强词项“所有”的情况下能否计算“一些”所产生的等级含义;实验二考察学前普通话儿童在提供强词项“所有”的情况下能否计算“一些”所产生的等级含义。实验一发现儿童和成人对测试句的接受率分别为83%和20%。实验二发现儿童对测试句的接受率降至67%,成人降为15%。该实验结果表明语境中的强词项有利于帮助儿童计算等级含义。因此,儿童有限的词库更有可能是导致其计算等级含义困难的原因。此外,儿童与成人计算等级含义的差异支持连续性假设的观点。

Previous studies have demonstrated that unlike adults,young children have difficulty computing scalar implicatures.Two distinct accounts have been proposed for this phenomenon.On one account,as computing scalar impliactures involves three complicated steps,including lexical retrieval,lexical replacement and negation of the statement with the stronger alternative,young children’s limited working memory is the source of their failure to compute scalar implicatures.On an alternative account,children’s restricted lexicon causes their inability to implement lexical replacement,which results in their failure of computing scalar implicatures.Against this background,the present study attempts to probe the underlying mechanism of preschool Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of scalar implicatures.The purpose is to figure out why children often fail to compute scalar implicatures.Using a picture verification task,we conducted two experiments.Experiment 1 investigated whether preschool Mandarin-speaking children can compute scalar implicatures triggered by yixie“some”when the stronger alternative suoyou“all”is not provided in the experimental contexts.Experiment 2 examined whether children can compute scalar implicatures triggered by yixie“some”when the stronger alternative suoyou“all”is explicitly provided in the experimental contexts.The main findings were as follows.In Experiment 1,the child participants accepted the test sentences 83%of the time,and adults did so 20%of the time.In Experiment 2,the children accepted the test sentences 67%of the time,and adults did so 15%of the time.Taken together,the findings suggest that contextually introduced stronger alternatives facilitate young children’s computation of scalar implicatures.Therefore,our findings appear to support the account that the restricted lexicon is the source of young children’s failure of computing scalar implicatures.Moreover,the difference between children’s and adults’ability of computing scalar implicatures tends to support the Continuity Assumption.