Mandarin Children’s Acquisition of Numeral Container Classifier Phrases

• Published in: Chinese Lexical Semantics pp. 871 - 878
• Main Author: Yuan, Xiaohe
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Acquisition; Counting; Measure; Numeral container classifier phrases
• ISBN: 9783030811969; 3030811964
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_72

This study aims to discover native Mandarin-speaking children’s knowledge and acquisition of the numeral container classifier phrases in Mandarin Chinese. Such phrases are ambiguous and often have two readings. san bei shui ‘three cups of water’ does not only have a counting reading, referring to three cups, but also has a measure reading. Our measure de comprehension experiments showed that both adults and children tended to have a strong bias for counting: in the recipe context, the majority of adults would accept san bei (de) shui ‘one cup of water’ even if the cup was halfway filled with water; 3-to-5-year-olds would have a much stronger bias for counting, as they would accept it regardless of the little amount of water inside.