No “Chinese-speaking phase” in Chinese Children's Early Grammar - A Study of the Scope between Negation and Universal Quantification in Mandarin Chinese

•There is no Musolino's “Chinese-speaking phase” in Chinese Children's Early Grammar.•Lexical, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic factors interact to determine scope.•The vital importance of word order needs to be gradually acquired by children.•The children's knowledge about scope converges on the adults' around in their 7th year.

Based on the naturalistic data from four children (aged from 00;10 to 02;06) and experimental data from 60 children (aged from four to eight years old) and 15 adults, the study proposes that Mandarin speakers' judgment about the scope assignment between negation and universal quantification is attributed to the interplay of several influential factors: word order, lexical semantics of logical expressions, structural complexity, conversational implicature, and felicity in the use of negation. Knowledge about the vital importance of word order in the grammar of Mandarin-speaking adults is not initially present in the grammar of children, but is gradually acquired. They initially rely excessively on lexical semantics in interpreting scope, sometimes leading to non-adult interpretations. Full mastery of scope knowledge comes when they become fully aware of the prominent role of isomorphism, at age 6 or 7.