Mandarin-Speaking Children's Use of Prosodic Cues in the Acquisition of Ambiguous Structures
The comprehension and processing of ambiguous structures has long been investigated in psycholinguistic research.However,previous studies mainly focus on adults'processing,with very limited research looking at children's acquisition of relevant structures.To explore the underlying mechanism of children's acquisition of ambiguous structures,we conduct an experimental study to investigate how 3-to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children use prosodic cues to interpret ambiguous"zenme"questions.The wh-adjunct"zenme"in Mandarin is ambiguous,which can be used to question either the manner("manner reading")or the cause("causal reading")of an event.A Question/Answer Task is devised to examine whether Mandarin-speaking children could use prosodic cues to establish these two interpretations correspondingly.The results reveal that Mandarin-speaking children exhibit an asymmetry in the time course of acquiring the"manner reading"as opposed to the"causal reading".Children at age 3 already show proficiency in deriving the"manner reading"by relying on prosodic cues,but they are not yet able to establish a fully adult-like"causal reading"by using the same cues until 5 years of age.We then discuss the underlying mechanism of children's acquisition of ambiguous structures within the framework of the"Growing Trees Approach".