漢語添加算子的習得

Although additive particles are detected in child language at a very early age in longitudinal studies,previous experimental studies show that children at 6 cannot interpret these particles appropriately.This poses the question why children’s comprehension of these particles runs behind production.In this study,the acquisition of Mandarin additives will be examined with three groups of particles: hai(STILL),you(AGAIN) and ye(TOO).They have stressed and unstressed variants,which renders different scopes and triggers different presuppositions.Experiments are conducted to examine the variants in both production and comprehension. The experiments of production are mainly elicitation tasks with picture description and video description,while the comprehension tasks are act-out tasks and the truth-value judgment task.The results show that Mandarin additives are acquired at as early as 2 years old for all the six variants.However,the comprehension pattern splits with respect to different variants: children comprehend stressed hai and you as early as 2,though they cannot interpret stressed ye and unstressed additives correctly until 7 years old. The results seem to suggest that children at a very young age have mastered the linguistic knowledge necessary to produce correct sentences with additive particles,such as that of scope,focus,c-command relation and even the idiosyncratic properties of different particles.The children’s incapability of interpreting ye as well as the additives with a focus following is caused by different presuppositions of variants of additive particles.The reason why children could do much better in the stressed hai and stressed you cases is also discussed.