Abstract
This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children’s acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children’s interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb yinggai ‘should,’ like ‘Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le’, whose meanings depend on the landing sites of yinggai at LF (root interpretation: Xiaohua is obligated to go to bed now. epistemic interpretation: It is the case that Xiaohua has gone to bed.). The results of truth value judgment task from 15 children (range: 4;8–6;2, mean: 5;4) and 37 adults indicate that both groups tend to interpret the ambiguous yinggai as epistemic readings and that children’s interpretation is adult-like. Thus, this study supports (Syrett and Lidz’s in Lang Acquis 16:67–81, 2009) view that 5-year-olds have adult-like LF development and their difficulties in interpreting covert movements may be reduced to extra-grammatical factors.
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Notes
Cinque treats the volitional use of modality as a subclass of root modality.
One thing readers should bear in mind is that in the literature the terms ‘root’ and ‘deontic’ are sometimes used interchangeably. However, Palmer (1990) argues that deontic and dynamic uses are two subtypes of root modality. Additionally, as mentioned in footnote one, Cinque treats the volitional use of modality as a subclass of root modality. We, therefore, will be consistent in our use of ‘root’ to mean ‘non-epistemic’ uses of modality.
Abbreviations used in this study include: ASP: aspect marker, DE: the verbal suffix or the marker for modifying phrases like genitive phrases, relative clauses, and noun complement clauses, Q: question marker, SFP: sentence final particle and Top: topic marker.
Levene’s test for equality of variances was not assumed (\(\hbox {F} = 4.35, p = .042\)), so the adjusted statistics is reported here.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the anonymous Journal of Psycholinguistic Research reviewers for their extensive and thoughtful comments. We thank all the children, teachers, and directors at the Kamen Kindergarten, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan and the adult subjects from Far East University, Tainan City, Taiwan. Special thanks are due to Kai-Yuei Ray Chang, Po-jen Hsieh, and Yu-Jay Ansel Liu for their assistance in various aspects of this work. An earlier version of the paper was presented in the conference Applied Linguistics on Global Fronts: Culture, Pedagogy, Translation, and Communication. The first author especially thanks Prof. Yiching Su, Prof. Chen-Sheng Luther Liu, and Prof. James Hsiao-tzu Yang. The idea of this work was initiated when the first author was taking Prof. Su’s course Child Language Acquisition in 2012. This work wouldn’t be possible without her advice and valuable comments. The syntactic literature discussed in this work wouldn’t be accessible without Prof. Liu’s instruction and the first author always benefited tremendously from each discussion with him. The first author is grateful to Prof. James Hsiao-tzu Yang’s consecutive encouragement and guidance in these years. Finally, the first author was fulfilling the mandatory military service as a substitute military service draftee in Tainan City, Taiwan when revising the article; therefore, special thanks go to Eiger Hong, Frank Wu and Yu-ting Lin for their constant help and encouragement in those months. All the remaining mistakes, of course, are our own responsibility.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Test Stories of Keyi ‘Can’ and Keneng ‘Possible’
(A1) Test items for the root modal keyi ‘can’
Story 1: See (12).
Story 2:
(A2) Test items for the epistemic modal keneng ‘possible’
Story 1:
Story 2:
Appendix B: Test Stories of Yinggai ‘Should’
(B3) Test items for sentences containing the ambiguous yinggai ‘should’
Story 1: See (13).
Story 2:
Story 3:
Story 4:
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Liu, CT.J., Lee, HF.H. Modality and Children’s Scope Understanding. J Psycholinguist Res 43, 487–506 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-013-9263-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-013-9263-5