Peng Zhou

Agent-First Bias in Children’s Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Mandarin

The article investigates children’s agent-first bias in sentence comprehension. Agent-first bias refers to the phenomenon in which children (or adults) tend to assign the agent role to the first noun phrase (NP) in a sentence. Previous studies suggest that children acquiring Indo...

Semantic composition and pragmatic reasoning in preschool children’s interpretation of negated gradable adjectives

Abstract Absolute gradable adjectives (e.g., dry ) and relative gradable adjectives (e.g., tall ) interact differently with negation, with only negated absolute gradable adjectives semantically entailing their antonyms (e.g., not dry ⊨ wet ). This study examined how 4- and 5-year...