Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore whether 4-to-6-year-old Mandarin-acquiring children have adult-like interpretations of non-interrogative indefinite wh-words in conditional constructions, which are interpreted as statements since wh-phrases are used non-interrogatively. Three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 is designed to assess children’s interpretation of existential wh-words shei ‘who’ and shenmeren ‘who’ in the conditional headed by zhiyao ‘as long as’. We tested whether Mandarin-acquiring children are sensitive to the distinction between the interrogative and non-interrogative use of wh-phrases in conditional constructions. Experiments 2 and 3 are designed to test Mandarin-acquiring children’s interpretation of bare conditionals containing the wh-word shei ‘who’ in both subject and object argument positions (Cheng & Huang 1996). To acquire the adult-like use of bare conditionals as statements, children must be able to recognize the element jiu ‘then’ as the licensing cue of non-interrogative indefinite wh-phrases. Otherwise, they will interpret the two clauses in bare conditionals as two independent interrogative questions. Therefore, Experiments 2 and 3 examined whether children can use jiu as the licensing cue to access the meanings of bare conditionals. The experimental results demonstrate that 4-to-6-year-old Mandarin-acquiring children exhibit non-adult-like interpretations of wh-words both in zhiyao-conditionals and bare conditionals. Of the two conditionals, children’s performance appears to be more adult-like on zhiyao-conditionals. The current results stand in contrast with Zhou’s (2010) finding that children possess early mastery of existential indefinite wh-phrases under negation. The delay in the acquisition suggests that there exists an acquisition divergence among indefinite wh-phrase of different licensing environments and further may provide evidence for Lin’s (1998) observation that indefinite wh-phrases in bare conditionals may be different from those in typical conditionals.