Development of Referential Dependency in Preschool Mandarin-Speaking Children

Children's knowledge of referential dependency involved in the interpretation of reflexives has been investigated mainly from a purely syntactic perspective. However, syntax alone is insufficient to account for various kinds of referential dependencies, as many of them require discourse interpretations. To fill this gap, the present study investigated the development of referential dependency established between the Mandarin reflexive ziji and its antecedent in preschool children by taking advantage of the properties of ziji, whose interpretations largely hinge on discourse contexts. A truth-value judgement task was conducted to investigate how 3- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children build referential dependencies between the anaphor ziji and its antecedent and between the logophor ziji and its antecedent. The results show that children performed equally well in both types of referential dependencies, and they exhibit a developmental trajectory in their knowledge of referential dependencies. The implications of the findings were then discussed in relation to the role of processing factors and language-specific properties.