Do children know WHanything?: Acquisition of wh-ambiguity in Mandarin

摘要

Identifying interrogatives in a language is a challenging task, especially for children acquiring languages like Mandarin, where there is no wh-movement and wh-words (wh) can function both as question words and indefinites (Huang 1982 a.o.). As a result of these factors, strings like (1) can either be interpreted as a question or a statement. In this study we show preschoolers are aware of this ambiguity and can use prosody to arrive at the correct interpretation (Exp 1), but have trouble blocking the interrogative interpretation in V-not-V questions (Exp 2).