Children’s Acquisition of Demonstrative Pronouns in Mandarin Chinese

532 Children’s Acquisition of Demonstrative Pronouns in Mandarin Chinese* Yi-jing Zhao National Taiwan Normal University, Linguistic Program, Taipei, Taiwan jyjing7@yahoo.com.tw Abstract. This paper investigates children’s comprehension and production of demonstrative pronouns (DPs), ‘zhege’ (this) and ‘nage’ (that), in Mandarin Chinese. Subjects are children of ages three, four, five and six. Based on the results of the present experiment, children’s developmental stages and the corresponding age grading are provided. Also, the present study incorporates a physical clue into the experiment. The result suggests that in the acquisition of deixis children rely highly on physical context to work out the meaning distinction. In addition, Piaget’s egocentrism hypothesis and H. Clark’s marking hypothesis are examined in the study. The result seems to support the egocentrism hypothesis. Subjects under the age of six do fail to shift the deictic center when they and the experimenter have a different perspective. As for the marking hypothesis, the study seems to challenge the hypothesis. The result shows that children actually performed better on the marked term ‘zhege’ than the unmarked member ‘nage’. Keywords: deixis; demonstrative; pronoun; egocentrism; language acquisition. 1. Introduction Languages are primarily designed for face-to-face communication in daily life and thus can not be separated from context of utterance (Lyons 1977a). All natural languages, hence, have ‘gear’ to relate the utterance with its context. Deixis is perhaps the most useful gear in reflecting the relationship between language and context. Deictic terms can link the utterance with specific person, time, place, or speech event. They include personal pronouns (e.g. I, you), demonstratives (e.g. this, that), and some adverbs indicating place (e.g. here, there) and time (e.g. tomorrow) (Levinson 1983). In the field of language acquisition inquiry, these deictic words are found to emerge early and frequently in children’s language. According to literature, early in their very first word stage children can use deictic terms with the form ‘ah’, ‘eh’, or ‘da’ (Lindner 1898, Leopold 1949) and by the age of two and a half, deictic words like ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ appear in children’s language (Grant 1915; Nice 1915; De Villiers and De Villiers 1974; Rodrigo 2004). * I am grateful for the crucial comments from the anonymous reviewers, which help sharpen and clarify several main points in this paper. Special thanks go to Professor Chun-Yin Chen for the critical comments and suggestions. Also, I thank my grandfather, Zhu-Mu Zhao, my parents, Su-Ying Chen and Shan-Long Zhao, my brother, Shi-Jie Zhao and my sister Ya-Ling Zhao for the encouragements on all occasions. Copyright 2007 by Yi-jing Zhao 533 One thing worth mentioning is that these deictic terms usually appear along with all kinds of physical expressions. In actual language use, speakers make use of a variety of nonlinguistic clues such as eye gaze and gestures while producing the deictic words. Previous studies also prove that from about age one onwards children can and do utilize the non-linguistic clues of the speaker to identify what is the intended joint attention (Leung and Pheingold 1981; Tomasello, Call, …

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