Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T06:14:29.082Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Acquisition of generic noun phrases in Chinese: learning about lions without an ‘-s’*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2011

TWILA TARDIF ,
SUSAN A. GELMAN ,
XIAOLAN FU  and
LIQI ZHU
TWILA TARDIF*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
SUSAN A. GELMAN
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
XIAOLAN FU
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
LIQI ZHU
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
*
Address for correspondence: Twila Tardif, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor MI48109-1043. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

English-speaking children understand and produce generic expressions in the preschool years, but there are cross-linguistic differences in how generics are expressed. Three studies examined interpretation of generic noun phrases in three- to seven-year-old child (N=192) and adult speakers (N=163) of Mandarin Chinese. Contrary to suggestions by Bloom (1981), Chinese-speaking adults honor a clear distinction between generics (expressed as bare NPs) and other quantified expressions (‘all’/suo3you3 and ‘some’/you3de). Furthermore, Mandarin-speaking children begin to distinguish generics from ‘all’ or ‘some’ as early as five years, as shown in both confirmation (Study 2) and property-generation (Study 3) tasks. Nonetheless, the developmental trajectory for Chinese appears prolonged relative to English and this seems to reflect difficulty with ‘all’ and ‘some’ rather than difficulty with generics. Altogether these results suggest that generics are primary, and that the consistency of markings affects the rate at which non-generic NPs are distinguished from generics.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 130 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by NICHD grant HD36043 and a joint research grant between the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. We are grateful to the teachers, staff and children of the Beijing preschools who participated. We wish to thank Catherine Wan and Jing Tan for their able assistance in running these studies and to Shanping Qiu for her assistance with Study 3. We also thank the reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments.

References

REFERENCES

Bloom, A. (1981). The linguistic shaping of thought: A study in the impact of language on thinking in China and the West. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Brooks, P. J., Jia, X., Braine, M. D. S. & DaGraca Dias, M. (1998). A cross-linguistic study of children's comprehension of universal quantifiers: A comparison of Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and English. First Language 18, 33–79.Google Scholar
Carlson, G. (1977). Reference to kinds in English. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Carlson, G. N. & Pelletier, F. J. (eds)1995. The generic book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cheng, L. L.-S. (1995). On dou-quantification. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 4, 197–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheng, L. & Sybesma, R. (1999). Bare and not so bare nouns. Linguistic Inquiry 30(4), 509–542.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A., Gelman, S. A. & Brandone, A. (2010). Theory-based considerations influence the interpretation of generic sentences. Language and Cognitive Processes 25, 261–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cimpian, A. & Markman, E. M. (2008). Preschool children's use of cues to generic meaning. Cognition 107, 19–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dahl, O. (1975). On generics. In Kennan, E. L. (ed.), Formal semantics of natural language, 99–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erbaugh, M. S. (2006). Chinese classifiers: Their use and acquisition. In Li, P. (ed.), Handbook of Chinese psycholinguistics, 39–51. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. (2004). Learning words for kinds: Generic noun phrases in acquisition. In Hall, D. G. & Waxman, S. R. (eds), Weaving a lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Bloom, P. (2007). Developmental changes in the understanding of generics. Cognition 105, 166–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, S. A. & Raman, L. (2003). Preschool children use linguistic form class and pragmatic cues to interpret generics. Child Development 74(1), 308–325.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Tardif, T. Z. (1998). Generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin: An examination of child-directed speech. Cognition 66, 215–48.Google Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, S., Gelman, S. A. & Mylander, C. (2005). Expressing generic concepts with and without a language model. Cognition 96, 109–126.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hollander, M. A., Gelman, S. A. & Star, J. (2002). Children's interpretation of generic noun phrases. Developmental Psychology 38, 883–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huang, S.-Z. (1996). Quantification and predication in Mandarin Chinese: A case study of dou. Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Reports. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania. Available from: http://repository/upenn.edu/ircs_reports/114.Google Scholar
Hurewitz, F., Papafragou, A., Gleitman, L. & Gelman, R. (2006). Asymmetries in the acquisition of numbers and quantifiers. Language Learning and Development 2, 77–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M. & Cymerman, E. (2002). Language input and child syntax. Cognitive Psychology 45, 337–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leslie, S. J. (2007). Generics and the structure of the mind. Philosophical Perspectives 21, 375–403.Google Scholar
Leslie, S. J. (in press). Generics. In Craig, E. (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online/: www.rep.routledge.com.Google Scholar
Mannheim, B., Gelman, S. A., Escalante, C., Huayhua, M. & Puma, R. (2011). A developmental analysis of generic nouns in Southern Peruvian Quechua. Language Learning and Development 7(1), 1–23.Google Scholar
Milne, A. A. (1928). The house at Pooh corner. New York: E. P. Dutton.Google Scholar
Prasada, S. (2000). Acquiring generic knowledge. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, 66–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Prasada, S. & Dillingham, E. M. (2006). Principled and statistical connections in common sense conception. Cognition 99, 73–112.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sarnecka, B. W. & Gelman, S. A. (2004). Six does not just mean a lot: Preschoolers see number words as specific. Cognition 92, 329–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Slobin, D. (1985). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 2: Theoretical Issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Smith, C. L. (1979). Children's understanding of natural language hierarchies. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 27, 437–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, C. L. (1980). Quantifiers and question answering in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 30, 191–205.Google Scholar
Smith, L. B., Jones, S. S. & Landau, B. (1996). Naming in young children: A dumb attentional mechanism? Cognition 60(2), 143–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tabachnick, B. & Fidell, L. (1989). Using multivariate statistics. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Yang, R. (2001). Common nouns, classifiers, and quantification in Chinese. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Rutgers University. Available from: http://ling.rutgers.edu/papers/RYThesis.PDF.Google Scholar
Yoshida, H. & Smith, L. B. (2001). Early noun lexicons in English and Japanese. Cognition 82, B63–B74.Google Scholar
Yu, C. & Smith, L. B. (2007). Rapid word learning under uncertainty via cross-situational statistics. Psychological Science 18(5), 414–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed