Backward/forward anaphora in child and adult Mandarin Chinese

ABSTRACT This study reports findings from two truth value judgment experiments to address two research questions on Mandarin: (i) whether children and adults have the knowledge of the structural constraint Principle C in their pronoun resolution; and (ii) whether adults and children show the prohibition effect of the cyclic-c-command constraint or the QR account of pronouns on the coreference reading of backward anaphora for different types of subordinate clauses. The results show that children pattern similarly to adults for their interpretation of the Principle C sentences. For backward anaphora sentences, adults disallow the coreference reading for the deshihou ‘while/when’ clause but accept it for the yinwei ‘because’ clause, contrary to the predictions of the cyclic-c-command account and the QR account. However, children allow coreference for both types of clauses. The pattern from Mandarin-acquiring children is in line with previous studies on English, Italian, and Russian, which demonstrate that children respect a language-universal structural constraint (i.e., Principle C) at the initial stage of development, with the language-specific or even construction-specific constraint being acquired later.