Prosodic Resolution of Quantifier Scope Ambiguity in Child Mandarin.

In the domain of quantifier scope interpretation, cross-linguistic differences have been observed between Mandarin Chinese and English. In Mandarin, doubly quantified sentences with the logical notation “∀x (P (x) → ∃y (Q (y) ∧ R (x, y)))” only permit a surface-scope interpretation, whereas the English counterparts allow both surface-scope and inverse-scope interpretations. However, it has been shown that unlike adults, Mandarin-speaking children can access both the surface-scope and inverse-scope interpretation of such sentences, suggesting that they initially allow a flexible scope relation. Moreover, young children have been found to utilize prosodic contour to resolve scope ambiguity. Against this background, the present study attempts to explore whether children are able to use prosodic information to disambiguate the aforementioned doubly quantified sentences. To this end, we ran an experiment with Mandarin-speaking children and a group of adult controls in three prosodic conditions, using the picture selection task. In Condition 1, the test sentences were presented in a global level intonation, which served as a baseline of the experiment. In Condition 2, the subject NP of the test sentences was accentuated in the presentation. In Condition 3, the object NP was accentuated. The main findings were threefold. In Condition 1, children performed nearly at chance between the surface-scope and inverse-scope interpretations, whereas adults derived the isomorphic interpretation, suggesting that children interpret the test items as ambiguous, whereas adults do not. In Condition 2, both groups converged on the surface-scope interpretation. In Condition 3, both groups derived an inverse-scope interpretation. Considered together, the findings reveal that by age 4, Mandarin-speaking children readily recruit prosodic information to resolve quantifier scope ambiguity.