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Children's use of phonological information in ambiguity resolution: a view from Mandarin Chinese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 September 2011

PENG ZHOU ,
YI (ESTHER) SU ,
STEPHEN CRAIN ,
LIQUN GAO  and
LIKAN ZHAN
PENG ZHOU*
Affiliation:
Macquarie University
YI (ESTHER) SU
Affiliation:
Macquarie University
STEPHEN CRAIN
Affiliation:
Macquarie University
LIQUN GAO
Affiliation:
Beijing Language and Culture University
LIKAN ZHAN
Affiliation:
Beijing Language and Culture University
*
Address for correspondence: Peng Zhou, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. tel: +61 2 9850 6735; fax: +61 2 9850 6059; e-mail address: [email protected]
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Abstract

How do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment 1 used eye-tracking to assess children's use of stress in resolving structural ambiguities. Experiment 2 took advantage of special properties of Mandarin to investigate whether children can use intonational cues to resolve ambiguities involving speech acts. The results of our experiments show that children's use of prosodic information in ambiguity resolution varies depending on the type of ambiguity involved. Children can use prosodic information more effectively to resolve speech act ambiguities than to resolve structural ambiguities. This finding suggests that the mapping between prosody and semantics/pragmatics in young children is better established than the mapping between prosody and syntax.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , September 2012 , pp. 687 - 730
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was partially supported by the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science Postgraduate Grant to Peng Zhou, and the Chinese National Social Science Grant 09BYY022 to Liqun Gao. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the action editor for their insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the article. We would also like to thank the children and adults who took part in the experiments for their time and patience.

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