PMID- 19912672
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20110121
LR  - 20101005
IS  - 1469-7602 (Electronic)
IS  - 0305-0009 (Linking)
VI  - 37
IP  - 5
DP  - 2010 Nov
TI  - Focus identification in child Mandarin.
PG  - 965-1005
LID - 10.1017/S0305000909990110 [doi]
AB  - In this study, we investigated how Mandarin-speaking children and adults 
      interpret focus structures like Zhiyou Yuehan chi-le pingguo 'Only John ate an 
      apple' and Shi Yuehan chi-de pingguo 'It is John who ate an apple'. We found that 
      children tended to associate focus operators zhiyou 'only' and shi 'be' with the 
      verb phrase (VP), whereas adults uniquely associated them with the subject noun 
      phrase (NP). To account for this difference, we propose that children initially 
      treat focus operators as adverbials, thus ending up associating them with the VP. 
      In order to assess our proposal, we examined children's understanding of 
      zhiyou-constructions with negation, like Zhiyou Yuehan meiyou chi pingguo 'Only 
      John didn't eat an apple'. It was found that children, like adults, consistently 
      associated the focus operator with the subject NP in this construction. The 
      findings have an important bearing on language learnability, since negation 
      assists children in reaching the adult-like interpretation.
FAU - Zhou, Peng
AU  - Zhou P
AD  - Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia. pzhou@maccs.mq.edu.au
FAU - Crain, Stephen
AU  - Crain S
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
DEP - 20091116
PL  - England
TA  - J Child Lang
JT  - Journal of child language
JID - 0425743
SB  - IM
MH  - Adult
MH  - Child
MH  - *Child Language
MH  - Child, Preschool
MH  - China
MH  - Humans
MH  - Language
MH  - *Semantics
EDAT- 2009/11/17 06:00
MHDA- 2011/01/22 06:00
CRDT- 2009/11/17 06:00
PHST- 2009/11/17 06:00 [entrez]
PHST- 2009/11/17 06:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2011/01/22 06:00 [medline]
AID - S0305000909990110 [pii]
AID - 10.1017/S0305000909990110 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - J Child Lang. 2010 Nov;37(5):965-1005. doi: 10.1017/S0305000909990110. Epub 2009 
      Nov 16.