1. Introduction

Introduced the concept of discourse bridging and its importance in children's language development. Bridge building is a discourse operation that involves the connection of definite DP and indefinite DP antecedents, as well as the reference of reflexive pronouns to their antecedents. Academic research on children's bridging abilities has mostly focused on Indo European language children, while Chinese, as a language lacking explicit morphological and syntactic markers, deserves further investigation into the development of children's bridging abilities. The research aims to answer three questions: whether children can bridge the gap between definite DP and its antecedent, whether children can bridge the gap between the reflexive pronoun "self" and its antecedent, and the interactive relationship between language knowledge and nonverbal cognitive factors in the development of children's bridging ability.

2. Research background

We discussed the ability of preschool children to use definite DP for bridging in different language backgrounds, and pointed out that Dutch, English, and Russian children cannot bridge correctly at the age of three, possibly due to the inability to share perspectives, lack of processing resources, or excessive information. The bridging ability of Chinese children without explicit morphological and syntactic markers has not been studied yet. Through the study of bridging the use of reflexive pronouns in Indo European and Chinese children, it was found that Chinese children had already mastered various uses of the reflexive pronoun "self" by the age of four. The relevant theories include the vocabulary learning hypothesis, maturity hypothesis, and module hypothesis, but there is little research discussing the interaction between language knowledge and nonverbal cognitive factors. This study aims to investigate the development of bridging abilities in preschool Chinese children through two experiments.

Experiment 1: Building a Bridge between DP and Its Preceptors

Experiment 1 aims to explore the ability of preschool Chinese children to bridge the gap between their use of definite DP and their antecedent words. By comparing the performance of three year old, four year old, and five-year-old children, the development path of bridging ability is analyzed. The experiment adopts a simplified version of the truth judgment task, using a computer to present pictures and tell stories. Children need to judge whether the doll's answer is correct. The subjects were 91 preschool Mandarin speaking children, divided into three age groups, with an additional 20 adults serving as the control group. Two conditions were set for the experiment: low significance antecedents and high significance antecedents, with 8 test sentences each.

4. Experiment 2: Bridge construction between reflexive pronouns and their antecedents

Experiment 2 aims to explore the ability of preschool Chinese children to bridge the gap between the reflexive pronoun "self" and the antecedent. By changing the argument structure, the experiment set two conditions: common argument and non common argument, to examine the role of working memory in the bridging process. The experiment adopts a combination of stories and pictures, with a total of 16 test sentences, divided into two situations: "true" and "false". The results showed that the accuracy of children's bridge construction was relatively high under different conditions, and age group was the only significant factor affecting bridge construction ability. Specifically, the performance of four - and five-year-old children is significantly better than that of three-year-old children, while there is no significant difference between four - and five-year-old children. This indicates that Chinese children have the ability to bridge themselves with antecedent words from the age of three, but as they grow older, the development of bridging ability shows a trend of first fast and then slow. This result is consistent with the trend of Experiment 1, indicating that although three-year-old children have the language knowledge required for bridging, the limitations of cognitive processing resources affect their effective use of this knowledge.

5. The interaction between language knowledge and nonverbal cognitive factors in the development of bridging ability

The interaction between language knowledge and nonverbal cognitive factors in the development of discourse bridging ability in preschool Chinese children was explored through experiments one and two. The knowledge of Chinese language features affects children's ability to access nonverbal cognitive resources, such as the rigid form of DP in Chinese and the usage of the reflexive pronoun "self", which in turn affects children's bridging performance. Meanwhile, the amount of nonverbal cognitive resources also affects whether children can use language knowledge correctly to build bridges. The experiment found that although three-year-old children have relevant language knowledge, due to limited working memory capacity, they cannot effectively apply this knowledge like four - and five-year-old children.

6. Conclusion

Summarizing the research on the development of discourse bridging ability in preschool Chinese children, it is pointed out that children can start bridging with definite DP and reflexive pronoun "self" from the age of three, develop rapidly from three to four years old, and enter a stable period after four years old. The study also found that the interaction between language knowledge and nonverbal cognitive factors affects children's bridging performance. The paper points out the shortcomings of the research, including the long time consumption of truth judgment tasks and the insufficient granularity of discourse bridging mechanisms. It is suggested that future research expand the sample size to enhance statistical power.