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Downward entailment in child Mandarin*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2011

YI (ESTHER) SU ,
PENG ZHOU  and
STEPHEN CRAIN
YI (ESTHER) SU*
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia
PENG ZHOU
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia
STEPHEN CRAIN
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia
*
Address for correspondence: Yi (Esther) Su, ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders, Level 4 Building C5C, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. e-mail: esther.su@mq.edu.au; sy-esther@hotmail.com
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Abstract

There are three hallmarks of core linguistic properties. First, they are expected to be manifested in typologically different languages. Second, they should unify superficially unrelated linguistic phenomena. Third, they are expected to emerge early in the course of language development, all things being equal (Crain, 1991). The present study investigates a candidate for a core linguistic property, namely the semantic property of downward entailment. We report the findings of two experimental studies of children's knowledge of downward entailment. These experiments explore two different aspects of downward entailment, in a study with Mandarin-speaking children. Taken together with previous research findings, the results of the present study support the conclusion that downward entailment is a core property of human languages.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 5 , November 2012 , pp. 957 - 990
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Grant DP0879842 to Stephen Crain and Rosalind Thornton. It was also partially supported by the Chinese National Science Grant 30770767 to Linyan Su and the Chinese National Social Science Grant 09BYY022 to Liqun Gao. We thank Nobu Akagi, Anna Notley, Francesco Ursini and especially Thomas Lee and Rosalind Thornton for valuable suggestions; we thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. We would also like to thank those children and adults who participated in the experiments for their support and cooperation in the research.

References

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