Children's Acquisition of Demonstrative Pronouns in Mandarin Chinese

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’.