Modality and Children’s Scope Understanding

Abstract

This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children's acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children's interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb yinggai 'should,' like 'Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le', whose meanings depend on the landing sites of yinggai at LF (root interpretation: Xiaohua is obligated to go to bed now. epistemic interpretation: It is the case that Xiaohua has gone to bed.). The results of truth value judgment task from 15 children (range: 4;8-6;2, mean: 5;4) and 37 adults indicate that both groups tend to interpret the ambiguous yinggai as epistemic readings and that children's interpretation is adult-like. Thus, this study supports (Syrett and Lidz's in Lang Acquis 16:67-81, 2009) view that 5-year-olds have adult-like LF development and their difficulties in interpreting covert movements may be reduced to extra-grammatical factors.

Processing conjunctive entailment of disjunction

“…In fact, it is not always easy for native speakers of a specific language to intuitively select the more prominent meaning of a globally ambiguous sentence. For instance, Liu & Lee (2014) Their experimental results from Truth Value Judgment Task showed that adult native speakers of Mandarin Chinese predominantly set the epistemic reading (72.97%) as the default interpretation. In fact, the default meaning of the global ambiguous sentences containing yinggai 'should' in an out-of-the-blue context can only be known by the support from the quantitative data.…”

“…This paper does not intend to provide a detailed account for why adults and children produced different patterns of judgments. One possibility is that children have limited processing capacity (see Liu & Lee (2014); Syrett & Lidz (2009);and Trueswell et al (1999) for a detailed discussion).…”

Awareness of Linguistic Ambiguity and Translator Training

“…( All five critical items were created based on the construction "SUBJECT + yīnggāi 'should' + VERB PHRASE+ le 'sentence final particle'," such as (5). The sentences were globally ambiguous because the modal verb yīnggāi "should" was ambiguous between a wide-scope epistemic reading, showing possibility, and a narrow-scope root reading, showing obligation (Lin, 2011(Lin, , 2012Liu & Lee, 2014). Therefore, if the participants were aware of the ambiguity, they were expected to choose choice c. Eighteen control items, such as (6), were created to examine if the participants maintained concentration and were used to decide if the data should be included for further analyses.…”