Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1043, USA.
J Child Lang. 2012 Jan;39(1):130-61. doi: 10.1017/S0305000910000735. Epub 2011 Aug 18.
English-speaking children understand and produce generic expressions in the preschool years, but there are cross-linguistic differences in how generics are expressed. Three studies examined interpretation of generic noun phrases in three- to seven-year-old child (N=192) and adult speakers (N=163) of Mandarin Chinese. Contrary to suggestions by Bloom (1981), Chinese-speaking adults honor a clear distinction between generics (expressed as bare NPs) and other quantified expressions ('all'/suo3you3 and 'some'/you3de). Furthermore, Mandarin-speaking children begin to distinguish generics from 'all' or 'some' as early as five years, as shown in both confirmation (Study 2) and property-generation (Study 3) tasks. Nonetheless, the developmental trajectory for Chinese appears prolonged relative to English and this seems to reflect difficulty with 'all' and 'some' rather than difficulty with generics. Altogether these results suggest that generics are primary, and that the consistency of markings affects the rate at which non-generic NPs are distinguished from generics.
说英语的儿童在学龄前就能理解和生成泛指句，但不同语言在生成泛指句的方式上存在差异。本研究用三个实验考察了汉语母语者（儿童：n=192；成人：n=163）对泛指名词短语的理解。实验结果与 Bloom（1981）的观点相反，汉语母语者明确区分了泛指句（裸 NP）和其他量化表达（“all”/suo3you3 和 “some”/you3de）。此外，汉语儿童早在五岁时就开始将泛指句与“all”或“some”区分开来，这在确认任务（研究 2）和属性生成任务（研究 3）中都得到了体现。尽管如此，汉语的发展轨迹似乎比英语更为漫长，这似乎反映了儿童在处理“all”和“some”时存在困难，而不是泛指句本身存在困难。总的来说，这些结果表明泛指句是基本的，标记的一致性会影响非泛指 NP 与泛指句区分的速度。
