Two Experimental Studies of Children’s Comprehension of Presuppositional You ‘Again’ in Mandarin

Abstract

Previous studies of children’s comprehension of the presupposition of English again and its Mandarin equivalent you (requiring that an event of the same kind previously took place) have reported successful acquisition by preschool age. Such studies have generally used tasks that require children to make binary judgments (e.g. “true”/ “false”, “yes”/“no”). However, sentences involving presupposition failure are not necessarily judged as “false” by adults, making such tasks less than optimal for assessing children’s knowledge of presuppositions. In this study, we examine Mandarin-acquiring children’s comprehension of the presupposition of you ‘again’, using two alternative tasks that target the presupposition without requiring participants to make binary judgments about sentences involving presupposition failure. In the Question-Answer Task (Experiment 1), participants listened to stories and answered a wh-question after each story. The results revealed that most children responded as though they ignored the presupposition trigger you, which highlights the methodological challenge of investigating children’s knowledge of presupposition. We then conducted a Felicity Judgment Task (Experiment 2), which highlighted the presence of the trigger by asking participants to decide which of two speakers—one who produced you and one who did not—answered better. In this task, children displayed sensitivity to the presupposition of you, albeit not at adult-like levels. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to children’s knowledge of you and its obligatory presence when its presupposition is satisfied, a potential ambiguity in its interpretation, and possible differences between children and adults in how they project presuppositions from wh-questions.