Testing Covert Downward Entailment in Child Chinese

Wei Chu, SLS

Li Zeng, English, Shanghai International Studies University, China

In this paper we present experimental results showing that Chinese children interpret sentences involving covert downward entailment differently from adults.  Disjunction under negation in Chinese is interpreted as a partial negation (1), while the full negation is expressed with the conjunction he (2):

            (1)            Tuzi            bu            hui            chi            hongluobo        huozhe            qingjiao.

                        Rabbit            not            will            eat            carrot               or                     green pepper

                        'Rabbit will not eat a carrot OR a green pepper.'

            (2)            Tuzi            bu            hui            chi            hongluobo        he            qingjiao.

                        Rabbit            not            will            eat            carrot               and            green pepper

                        'Rabbit will not eat a carrot AND a green pepper.'

A sentence  containing disjunction and a focus operator in (3) can be decomposed into two conjoined propositions in (4):

              (3)              Only Rabbit will eat a carrot or a green pepper.

              (4)              Presupposition:        

                            Rabbit will eat a carrot or a green pepper.

                       Assertion:

                                              Everyone other than Rabbit will not eat a carrot and will not eat a green pepper.

The acquisition of (3) is problematic because it involves complex logical calculation in (4) and the misleading linguistic input in (1) and (2).

                        4 children aged 3;4 to 4;1 and 6 adults were presented sentences like (3) in a Truth-Value-Judgment task in two conditions:

Condition I (True)

Condition II (False)

Results show Children judged the test sentences as true 100% in both conditions. We suggest that they assigned the disjunctive interpretation in the assertion component.