In this study we report data from three experiments designed to examine how Mandarin Chinese-speaking children and adults interpret scopally ambiguous sentences with negation and a numerically quantified object noun phrase similar to English sentences like “The boy did not ride two cows”. Our results from Experiments 1 and 2 differ from what Lidz & Musolino (2002) found in English and Kannada in two respects. First, English- and Kannada-speaking adults have easy access to both of the two interpretations of the sentences, but Mandarinspeaking adults have a strong preference to the narrow-scope reading of the numeral. Second, although English- and Kannada-speaking children prefer the narrow-scope reading of the numeral, which corresponds to the surface syntactic position, Mandarin-speaking children display a different pattern, i.e. they do not have problems accessing the wide-scope reading of the numeral. In addition, the results from Experiment 3 demonstrate that both children and adults are sensitive to the salience of the events in the context. Specifically, by manipulating the order of events in the stories, children are able to overcome their bias toward a preferred reading. Regarding the cross-linguistic differences on scope ambiguity resolution by children and adults between Mandarin and English/Kannada, it is argued that the discrepancy may arise due to the differences on the structure of quantified noun phrases and/or the structure of negative sentences among the languages.

語言習得; 歧異性語意判斷; 數量詞範域; 否定句; 國語（台灣）

language acquisition; ambiguity resolution; quantifier scope; negation; Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan)