Motion events in early child Mandarin: How preschoolers communicate dynamic spatial information in toy-play context?

Abstract

This study explored Chinese preschoolers’ expression of motion events in a toy-play context, focusing on developmental patterns and family predictors. A total of 1683 utterances produced by 192 preschoolers (aged 2, aged 3, aged 4, aged 5) about motion events were identified from the Corpus (oLi & Tse, Li & Tse, 2011). The descriptive and regression results revealed that: (1) there were significant age differences in the motion events production, utterance density, and lexical diversity (path verbs types), within the same half-hour play session; (2) the age 4.5 was identified as a critical period for developing caused motion events; (3) fathers’ daily time with children and the frequency of parents’ television watching with children were positive predictors for early motion events production.