Huang (2011)

Huang (2011) aimed to investigate Chinese children’s acquisition of pronominal interpretations from the perspective of antecedent-pronoun relation. Her subjects were 80 children, aged from 3; 1 to 7; 10 and 16 Chinese adults. Concerning the tasks, two comprehension tasks (picture-identification task with/without a rich context, PIC task; PI task) and one production task (imitation task, IM task) were employed.

Five patterns were examined including (1) antecedent in S position & pronominal in S position (SS), (2) antecedent in S position & pronominal in O position (SO), (3) antecedent in O position & pronominal in S position (OS), (4) antecedent in O position & pronominal in O position (OO), and (5) antecedent in possessor position (Poss). These five types were further divided into twelve subpatterns with regard to the possible antecedent–pronoun coreference.

For instance, ACs2-PC1 stands for the subpattern in which the antecedent is in the subordinate clause and the pronoun is in the main clause. The test sentence is like (21).

(21) Ruguo laoshu dapo chuanhu, ta hui shoushang.

if mouse break window he will hurt

‘If the mouse breaks the window, he will get hurt.’ (Huang, 2011: 129)

The results are as follows: First, a significant difference was found among the six age groups in three types (the S type, F (5, 90) = 23.528, p < .001; the O type, F (5, 90) = 24.295, p < .001; the Poss type, F (5, 90) = 18.203, p < .001). There was a tendency of S > O > Poss

according to the position of the antecedent. With regard to the differences in the main pattern, all the groups performed better on SO than SS (G1, M = 0.36 > 0.34; G2, M = 0.40 > 0.34;

G3, M = 0.50 > 0.38; G4, M = 0.47 > 0.44, G5, M = 0.60 > 0.51; G6, M = 0.77 > 0.67 in the S type) and OS than OO (G1, M = 0.38 > 0.33; G2, M = 0.40 > 0.29; G3, M = 0.39 > 0.34;

G4, M = 0.47 > 0.39, G5, M = 0.56 > 0.45; G6, M = 0.71 > 0.62 in the O type). With respect to the clausal effects, the children performed better on the complement clause than the

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adjunct clause (G1, M = 0.40 > 0.34; G2, M = 0.42 > 0.32; G3, M = 0.45 > 0.39; G4, M = 0.50 > 0.41, G5, M = 0.55 > 0.52). The children aged 7 to 8 had acquired adult-like interpretations in the complement clauses.

With regard to the minimal-distance principle influencing the subjects’ pronominal interpretations, the results showed that there was no significant difference in the subjects’

performances on the short-distance and long-distance types for all age groups (G1, F (1, 30)

=0.003, p >.05; G2, F (1,30) =1.092, p > .05; G3, F (1,30) =0.185, p > .05: G4, F (1,30) = 0.003, p > .05; G5, F (1,30) =1.565, p > .05; G6, F (1,30) =0.459, p > .05).

Considering the differences between backward and forward coreference, it was found that backward coreference was accepted by both the children and the adults, though the children performed better on forward than backward coreference, and the adult showed an opposite tendency (G1, M = 0.36 > 0.30; G2, M = 0.35 > 0.32; G3, M = 0.42 > 0.38; G4, M = 0.46 > 0.39, G5, M = 0.53 > 0.51; G6, M = 0.76 < 0.68). This supports the proposal that backward coreference is exhibited in Chinese (Huang, 1982; Kao, 1993).

Moreover, the results showed that all the age groups did better in the PIC task than the PI task because the children had difficulty understanding the ambiguous reading in the PI task (G1, M = 0.54 > 0.26; G2, M = 0.62 > 0.16; G3, M = 0.75 > 0.13; G4, M = 0.76 > 0.17, G5, M = 0.86 > 0.11; G6, M = 0.94 > 0.22.) Compared the results in the comprehension and production tasks, it was found that the latter posed more problem for the younger children (G1, M = 0.40 > 0.34; G2, M = 0.39 > 0.32; G3, M = 0.44 > 0.38; G4, M = 0.46 > 0.45). The older children and adults performed significantly better on the production task than on the two comprehension tasks (G5, F (1, 30) =18.743, p <.001; G6, F (1, 30) =135.548, p < .001).

In general, age influenced the interpretations of pronominal coreference. According to Huang, the children aged three to five had not yet been able to interpret pronouns well. Age five to seven seemed to be a transitional stage of the acquisition of pronouns since the children aged seven to eight significantly outperformed the younger children. Therefore,

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Huang’s findings showed that age six might be critical for children to acquire pronominal coreference in Chinese.

2.2.5 Summary

Although so far there have not been any studies on the L1 acquisition of the pronominal renjia in Mandarin Chinese, the similarities observed among these studies still serve as the

basis of the present study. Generally speaking, most results of the previous studies have showed that children’s comprehension and production of referential expressions improved with ages (Huang, 2011; Millogo, 2005; Schneider & Dubé, 1997). It has also been claimed by Huang (2011) that the age of six is a critical stage for the children’s acquisition of pronominal coreference, while Millogo (2005) has found that children’s referential adequacy in written texts is a late development, and that would continue to the age of eleven. In addition, factors influencing the subjects’ responses to pronominal expressions were story complexity, mutual knowledge, and the presentation way in the oral production task (Schneider & Dubé, 1997), effects of distance, thematization of subjects, and discourse focus in the written production task (Millogo, 2005), and ambiguous interpretations in contexts, antecedent-pronoun relation, clausal type, referential direction and antecedent types in the comprehension tasks as well as the oral production task (Huang, 2011). Although Millogo (2005) argued that effects of distance played an important role in influencing children’s pronominal acquisition, Huang (2011) argued for little influence of the distance effects. The L2 study on the pronominal renjia by Wei (2001) has been a big step toward the acquisition of indefinite pronouns in Mandarin Chinese. Factors affecting L2 learners’ interpretations of renjia involve the differences between single and multiple interpretations, referential

direction, referent types, the antecedent-pronoun relation, referring saliency, and blocking effects by verbs.

As for limitations of these studies, first, only one production task was employed in most

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studies, so the task design was imbalanced (i.e., Millogo, 2005; Schneider & Dubé, 1997).

Moreover, the purposes of the two studies were different; one was to examine children’s referencing ability in story retelling, and the other was to investigate children’s referential adequacy in written texts. Thus, it is hard to make a generalization of children’s acquisition of referential expressions. Although Wei (2001) employed two tasks to test L2 learners’

acquisition of the pronominal renjia in Mandarin Chinese, both of which were comprehension tasks. With only one type of task, it is unlikely for Wei to gain further understanding of learners’ performance on the production of the pronominal renjia. In addition, there are some inadequacies about grouping of subjects in these studies. The range of the subjects’ age in Schneider & Dubé’s (1997) study is too big (G1: 5.02 ~ 6.10, G2: 7.08

~ 8.61), with an interval of almost two years. In Wei (2001), most of her subjects were at the intermediate level, which is hard to see the L2 learners’ developmental progress, not to mention that she did not recruit a group of native controls. Table 2-1 summarizes the major findings and limitations of the four empirical studies reviewed in this section:

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Table 2-1 Major Findings and Limitations of the Previous Studies

Major Findings Limitations

2. Factors: the presentation way

1. employed a

2. Factors: effects of distance, thematization, and discourse focus

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