Help with child language project

[tieucorre]

I am working on project comparing how English and Chinese children understand simple sentences. In English, the sentence "Cars ran over apples" has multiple meanings. I am interested in how children understand two of them. On one meaning, a single group of cars ran over the same group of apples. For example, cars A, B and C jointly ran over the same bunch of apples. On the other meaning, Car A ran over some apples, Car B ran over other apples, and Car C ran over other apples. Does the Chinese sentence "che nian guo le ping guo" have those two meanings too? Or does it only have the meaning where one group of cars collectively ran over one group of apples? To put it differently, if I want to say that Car A ran over some apples, Car B ran over other apples, and Car C ran over other apples, do I have to put words like "mei ge" and/or "dou" in the sentence?

[xiaocai]

I don't know how other people will word this sentence in Chinese. As for myself, I will just say che nian guo le ping guo, unless it is absolutely necessarily to make clear that whether they are singular or plural, collective or distributive (still not sure what exactly these two words mean though...). So the Chinese sentence is, if not more, at least as vague as its English counterpart.

[tieucorre]

Thanks Xiaocai. I just clarified my question. I hope that helps.

[Lu]

I'm not a native speaker, but I think that in Chinese you also have different meanings, but they are different from the English:

- The/that/our car (we all know which car we're talking about) ran over apples/the apple.

- Cars ran over apples.

I hope this helps. I think you might need a different sentence for your project.

[tieucorre]

Thanks Lu!

[jbradfor]

I'm not language expert, but I feel that Chinese is if anything more ambiguous than English is, in terms of the lack of articles, verb conjugation for tense, and noun conjugation for singular/plural. [And by the same token, English can be more ambiguous than languages that have noun and/or verb conjugation for gender. For example, in English one can say "I spent the night at a friend's house" without specifying the gender of the "friend"; one can not do that in Spanish, for example.]

[LaoJian]

bump jbradfor, Abstraction and summary is one typical element of Chinese culture.

for your case, "che nian guo le ping guo", in my understanding in common as native speaker, one car ran over one apple or a bunch of apples, but it is also understandable for meaning multiple cars ran over many of apples laid on the road in any order or at the same time. so if you want to express more accurately, you would use more specific words to describe your meaning in sentence.

[tieucorre]

Thanks guys! That answers my question.