PhD Student Yan Shi Awarded Diversity Travel Fellowship to Present His Paper at the 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development

PhD student, Yan Shi, was awarded the Diversity Travel Fellowship by the organizing committee of the 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. This fellowship covered expenses (approximately $1300 USD) to present his research paper, co-authored with Xuan Wang, Na Gao, and Utako Minai, at the conference held from November 7th to 10th at Boston University in Boston, MA. Additionally, Yan was honored to be invited to the VIP dinner at the conference, attended by other awardees, members of the organizing committee, plenary speakers, and invited speakers.

Congratulations Yan!

Title: The role of discourse in Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of ambiguous wh-adjuncts

Abstract: The Mandarin wh-operator zenme is ambiguous between how (manner) and why (cause) interpretations, which are disambiguated by the syntactic position of a modal verb. Children, even with this syntactic cue, robustly prefer how-interpretations, not accessing why-interpretations until age 5. We examined the role of discourse for zenme-disambiguation, as the why-interpretation of zenme is driven by the unexpectedness of the cause, conveying a ”why-on-earth” interpretation. In our experiments, Mandarin-speaking children (aged 3-5) answered ambiguous and unambiguous zenme-questions about stories comprising cause and man- ner of an event: in one condition, stories first mentioned manner and then cause (MC order); in another condition, stories first mentioned cause and then manner (CM order). We found that 4-year-olds exhibited more why-interpretations for ambiguous zenme for the MC order than 3-year-olds, and that the MC order, interacting with the syntactic cue, facilitated children’s access to why-interpretations. Our findings revealed a discourse cue affecting children’s zenme disambiguation.