Telicity in context: Evidence from Mandarin-speaking children and adults

Abstract

This study examines how Mandarin-speaking children and adults evaluate telic descriptions in incomplete situations. It focuses on incremental-theme predi- cates with verbal -le and tests whether truth-value judgments depend simply on event (in)completeness or on the interaction between visual event structure and determiner type. Mandarin-speaking adults and children aged 4–6 judged sentences describing events in which either all three objects were partially affected (Each Object Incomplete, EOI) or two objects were fully affected and one was only partially affected (Third Object Incomplete, 3rdOI). The direct object appeared with either a numeral or a demonstrative determiner. Participants across age groups rejected incomplete events more often in 3rdOI than in EOI, showing that incomplete situations were not treated uniformly. Adults also showed a determiner contrast in 3rdOI, accepting demonstrative descriptions more readily than numeral descriptions. Children showed a developmental progression toward this pattern: all child groups were sensitive to Visual Completion Type, but only 6-year-olds showed a clear determiner contrast in 3rdOI. The results suggest that Mandarin telicity judgments are shaped by context-sensitive verification rather than by (in)completeness alone, and that developmental differences reflect how children map sentence meaning onto visual event representa- tions.