Child Mandarin Research Articles

A Corpus-Based Study of Spatial Frames of References in Early Child Mandarin Chinese

This study examines the developmental pattern of spatial frames of reference (FoRs) in Chinese preschoolers using the naturalistic data elicited from the Beijing Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus. Altogether, 2837 static spatial sentences were identified from the corpus, and 785 of them used FoRs; thus, they were analysed using the seven-class FoRs coding system developed from the literature review. The results indicated that: (1) six classes were produced by the Beijing preschoolers, including the direct reference (DR), geomorphic reference (GR), landmark-based reference (LBR), object-centred reference (OCR), relative reference (RR), and people-centred reference (PCR). But, the absolute reference (AR) frequently used by Beijing adults was not produced by the preschoolers; (2) significant age differences were found in the utterances with reference and demonstrative sentences and were also identified in the production of OCR, PCR, and RR; (3) there were no significant gender or gender x age effects in the production of FoRs, except for the no-frame sentences; and (4) there was a stable and consistent pattern of FoRs allocation by age, and the most frequently used was OCR. All these findings indicate interactions among language, culture, and cognition.

Acquisition of the Non-interrogative Uses of the Wh-Element Na in Child Mandarin

Acquisition of the Non-interrogative Uses of the Wh-Element Na in Child Mandarin

Do Girls Outperform Boys in Early Syntactic Development? Negative Evidence from Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers

This study aimed to verify the sex differences seen in our previous study on early syntactic development among Cantonese-speaking children with the same corpus design but a different Chinese language: Mandarin. The utterances produced during half-hour play activities by 192 Beijing children, ranging from 3 to 6 years, were collected in the Early Child Mandarin Corpus and analyzed in this study. Their syntactic development was measured in terms of mean length of utterance (MLU), sentence type and structure, syntactic complexity, and verb pattern. The statistical analyses indicated significant age differences in MLU, sentence types and structures, and syntactic complexity. However, no sex or age-by-sex differences in MLU were found. This negative evidence indicates that sex difference is neither universal nor cross-language. The implications for early childhood education and future studies are discussed.

Effects of Processing Limits on Computing Scalar Implicatures: Evidence from Child English and Child Mandarin

ABSTRACT Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children’s immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children’s working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that the children in these studies showed little individual variation in computing scalar implicatures. The present study therefore tested for an effect of working memory in younger children, who still clearly displayed difficulties with scalar implicatures and showed greater individual variation. Subjects were 4- to 7-year-old children acquiring either English or Mandarin Chinese. A covered-box task was used to investigate the computation of scalar implicatures associated with ‘some’. A digit span task was used to measure their working memory. Neither the Mandarin-speaking children nor the English-speaking children computed scalar implicatures at an adult-like level. Moreover, a significant correlation was observed between children’s computation of scalar implicatures and their digit spans. These results have provided new support for a processing approach to the observed late mastery of scalar implicatures.

Grammatical and contextual factors affecting the interpretation of superordinate collectives in child and adult Mandarin

Abstract The semantics of superordinate collectives (superordinates hereafter) such as English furniture are argued to be count or mass, or to allow both count and mass readings. When tested experimentally, however, it has repeatedly been reported that superordinates denote individuals in a wide range of typologically distinct languages, including Mandarin. A close examination of the experimental method and design commonly used in previous research suggests, however, that the attested individual-denoting reading might only be the preferred reading in neutral contexts rather than the only reading that superordinates allow. In the present study, using a Truth Value Judgment Task we investigate the interpretation of Mandarin superordinates by Mandarin-speaking adults and 4–6-year-old children. We found that bare superordinates can convey both individual-denoting and non-individual-denoting readings depending on specific contexts provided, but such contextual manipulation cannot override morphosyntax (the presence of an individual classifier that selects an individual-denoting reading only). Taken together, our experimental data indicate that both contextual and morphosyntactic information play an important role in the interpretation of Mandarin superordinates, but that they function in different ways. In a word, the present study contributes new data and opens new perspectives for further investigation in the interpretation of superordinates in Mandarin as well as in other languages.

Pseudo-relatives and restrictive-relatives in child Mandarin.

This study investigated why object-gap relative clauses (RCs) are dominant in early child Mandarin. We discuss how restrictive-RCs differ from pseudo-RCs syntactically and pragmatically, and examine how these two types of RCs are distributed in the RC utterances of ten children and their caregivers. The results showed that (a) Mandarin-speaking children produce many more pseudo-RCs than restrictive-RCs, (b) restrictive-RCs exhibit a subject-gap advantage and are dominantly headed, and (c) pseudo-RCs exhibit an object-gap advantage and are dominantly headless. We propose that the development of restrictive-RCs is mainly influenced by the structural factor, and that the extensive use of pseudo-RCs is attributed to the communicative needs of young children. Our findings also suggest that young children's pseudo-RCs tend to have a subject-focus reading, and the object-gap dominance observed in the pseudo-RCs of child Mandarin is related to the head-final RCs and the special structural features of the cleft construction in Mandarin.

The Effort of Parent-Child Reading Activity in Chinese Traditional Family Education

China is a country with traditional family education. Parents greatly influence their children, especially under the one-child policy and urbanization background. Chinese teaching requires context and training. Reading and communication are important ways to improve Chinese. Parent-child reading can better help students in grades 1-3 to read. This article aims to compare students' performance and interview results of parents in an elementary school in the immigrant city, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, to explore the supporting role of parents in this family education. Previously, similar language research work has examined the students' language development in Shenzhen Pontus' families for further research. This study used mixed methods to analyze the parent-child reading situation in a school in Shenzhen. This article also compared the students' Chinese performance to judge the impact of parent-child reading on students. The results show that the influence of parent-child reading in family education has an obvious positive effect. The specific auxiliary role is reflected in children's reading ability, Mandarin level, and literary knowledge. Therefore, this study suggests that teachers and parents promote parent-child reading work. Parent-child reading is not only conducive to the psychological growth of students but also conducive to the cultivation of students' language ability, especially for the cultivation of students' Mandarin and literary ability.

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

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.

Donkey pronouns in child Mandarin: Insights into the ∃/∀ dichotomy

Donkey pronouns and plural definites show similarities in their semantic interpretation. The parallels between the two elements seem to suggest a unified analysis. Studies of children’s understanding of plural definites show that children initially interpret plural definites existentially rather than universally. The findings invite us to ask whether children also exhibit a preference for interpreting donkey pronouns existentially. Two experiments were conducted to compare children’ and adults’ interpretation of donkey pronouns in conditional and relative- clause donkey sentences. The results of Experiment 1 show that children preferred the ∃-reading, whereas adults entertained the ∀-reading for both types of donkey sentences in upward- entailing contexts. Experiment 2 examined whether monotonicity influences the interpretation of donkey pronouns by creating a downward-entailing context. The findings were that in a downward-entailing context both children and adults preferred the ∃-reading. The findings led us to propose that the ∃-reading is perhaps the basic semantics of donkey pronouns while the ∀-reading is derived, and we suggest that the derivational path is bridged by free choice strengthening. The findings were then discussed in relation to the analysis of homogeneity and plural predication by Bar-Lev (2020).

A First Step toward the Clinical Application of Landmark-Based Acoustic Analysis in Child Mandarin.

As an initial step for the clinical application of landmark-based acoustic analysis in child Mandarin, the study quantified the developmental trajectories of consonants produced by four-to-seven-year-old children who acquired Taiwanese Mandarin as their first language. The results from a total of 80 children (20 in each age group, with gender balanced) indicated that younger age groups produced more +b landmark features than seven-year-olds did, showing that the development of obstruents was not completed by the age of six. A multiple regression showed that the participants’ speech intelligibility scores could be predicted by landmark features. Additionally, the +b landmark feature demonstrated the strongest net effect on speech intelligibility scores. The findings indicated that: (a) the landmark feature +b was an essential indicator of speech development in child Mandarin and; (b) the consonantal development in child Mandarin could be predicted by the physiological complexity of the articulatory gestures. Future studies focusing on a wider range of population (e.g., typically developing adults, aging and other clinical groups) with different language backgrounds are encouraged to apply landmark-based acoustic analysis to trace the linguistic development of a particular group.

A Corpus-Based Comparison of the Pragmatic Use of Qian and Hou to Examine the Applicability of Space–Time Metaphor Hypothesis in Early Child Mandarin

The Universal Space–Time Mapping Hypothesis suggests that temporal expression is based on spatial metaphor for all human beings. This study examines its applicability in the Chinese language using the data elicited from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus (ECMC) (Li and Tse, 2011), which collected the utterances produced by 168 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in a semistructured play context. The unique pair of Chinese words, qian (前/before/front) and hou (后/after/back), which can be used to express either time (before/after) or space (front/back) in daily communication, was the unit of analysis. The results indicated that: (1) there was a significant age effect in the production of “qian/hou,” indicating that the period before the age of 4.5 may be critical for the development of temporal and spatial expression; (2) the pair was produced to express time (before/after) much earlier than space (front/back), indicating that the expression of time might not necessarily be based on the spatial metaphor; and (3) the pair was used more frequently to express time (before/after) than space (front/back) by the preschoolers, thus challenging the hypothesis.

The Interpretation of Disjunction in the Scope of Dou in Child Mandarin.

A recent theory provides a unified cross-linguistic analysis of the interpretations that are assigned to expressions for disjunction, Negative Polarity Items, Free Choice Items, and the non-interrogative uses of wh-phrases in languages such as Mandarin Chinese. If this approach is on the right track, children should be expected to demonstrate similar patterns in the acquisition of these linguistic expressions. Previous research has found that, by age four, children have acquired the knowledge that both the existential indefinite renhe “any” and wh-words in Mandarin Chinese are interpreted as Negative Polarity Items when they are bound by downward entailing operators, but the same expressions are interpreted as Free Choice Items (with a conjunctive interpretation) when they are bound by deontic modals (Mandarin keyi) or by the Mandarin adverbial quantifier dou “all”. The present study extends this line of research to the Mandarin disjunction word huozhe. A Truth Value Judgment Task was used to investigate the possibility that disjunction phrases that are bound by the adverbial quantifier dou generate a conjunctive interpretation in the grammars of Mandarin-speaking 4-year-old children. The findings confirmed this prediction. We discuss the implications of the findings for linguistic theory and for language learnability.

Domain restriction in child Mandarin: Implications for quantifier spreading

AbstractThis study explores Mandarin children’s competence with quantifier domain restriction. We present results from two experiments in which adults and four- to five-year old children evaluated two possible candidates for the domain selection associated with the distributive operatordou‘all’ in Mandarin Chinese. In the first experiment, we investigated whether children and adults are capable of selecting an appropriate domain when two candidate NPs both appear insidedou’s quantification scope; i.e., both of the NPs c-commanddou. In the second experiment, still two candidate NPs were presented, but one withindou’s scope and the other outside its scope. Our results indicate that four- to five-year-old children are capable of basic distributive computation associated withdou, but they may choose an NP that adults do not usually choose as the domain ofdou, resulting in non-adult interpretations of distributive computation in certain cases. Based on the results, we propose that four- to five-year-old children are less certain about the domain restriction associated withdou-quantification. This proposal has important implications for the current debate on the acquisition of universal quantifiers, specifically, the problem of quantifier spreading. We explain children’s uncertainty about the domain restriction with a universal grammar-based statistical acquisition model.

Multimedia Input and Bilingual Children's Language Learning.

The current study seeks to explore the impact of multimedia input at home on bilingual children’s language outcomes. Two hundred and two Singaporean English-Mandarin kindergarteners’ multimedia experience (i.e., the resources and the amount of multimedia input) and conventional language exposure (e.g., language use with family members) were investigated with a parental questionnaire. A series of English and Mandarin tests were conducted to assess children’s proficiency (i.e., in receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, verbal fluency) by standardized measures. Results demonstrated that the diversity of multimedia input is more important than the amount of multimedia input in promoting children’s Mandarin language maintenance, while controlling for children’s conventional language exposure, SES, and language aptitude. The number of multimedia sources is significantly and positively related to children’s general Mandarin proficiency. In contrast, English multimedia exposure at home exerts little impact on children’s general English proficiency. The findings indicate the unique contribution of multimedia diversity to children’s early heritage language maintenance. The strong social relevance of the study is discussed at the end of the paper.

The acquisition of the locative subject construction in Mandarin: An aspectual account

Mandarin locative subject construction involves mismatches across argument structure and information structure, as well as complex interactions between event types and aspect markers. Acquiring the construction requires the integration of information across syntax–pragmatics and syntax–semantics interfaces, and thus it is predicted to be difficult. Based on the data of 151 children from age 1;7 (one year and seven months) to 6;0 (six years) in three child Mandarin corpora, we found that locative subject sentences (LSSs) emerged around 2;0, but the early verbs are exclusively existential verbs. Aspectually marked LSSs are extremely rare in child data, with only a few having placement verbs and posture verbs marked with the perfective aspect marker -le. In our modified forced-choice experiment, the children showed low sensitivity to this construction's aspectual properties: three-year-olds significantly differed from adults in rejecting aspectually marked LSSs; up to six years old, the children could not identify the aspectual clash between a manner-of-motion verb and -le, and the clash between a transitive process verb and Agent. Such low sensitivity is attributed to Mandarin-speaking children's insufficient exposure to aspectually marked LSSs in the input as shown by our corpus data and the complexity posed by the interface properties of this construction.

Backward/forward anaphora in child and adult Mandarin Chinese

ABSTRACTThis study reports findings from two truth value judgment experiments to address two research questions on Mandarin: (i) whether children and adults have the knowledge of the structural constraint Principle C in their pronoun resolution; and (ii) whether adults and children show the prohibition effect of the cyclic-c-command constraint or the QR account of pronouns on the coreference reading of backward anaphora for different types of subordinate clauses. The results show that children pattern similarly to adults for their interpretation of the Principle C sentences. For backward anaphora sentences, adults disallow the coreference reading for the deshihou ‘while/when’ clause but accept it for the yinwei ‘because’ clause, contrary to the predictions of the cyclic-c-command account and the QR account. However, children allow coreference for both types of clauses. The pattern from Mandarin-acquiring children is in line with previous studies on English, Italian, and Russian, which demonstrate that children respect a language-universal structural constraint (i.e., Principle C) at the initial stage of development, with the language-specific or even construction-specific constraint being acquired later.

Predicting Chinese and English interrogative development in a multilingual context: a corpus-based study of Singapore preschoolers

ABSTRACT This study elicited and analyzed all the Chinese and English interrogatives from the Singapore Early Child Mandarin Corpus (132 children aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6) to examine the effects and predictors of early bilingual development in Singapore preschoolers. The results indicated that: (1) there was significant age (but not gender) effect in the production of Chinese and English interrogatives; (2) relatively more types of English interrogatives were produced and more preschoolers produced English interrogatives; (3) Parent Language Input Pattern significantly predicted the increase of Chinese interrogatives, whereas Parent Language Input Pattern and Language Spoken by Child jointly but negatively predicted English interrogatives; (4) the pattern that both parents only speak Chinese was associated with the highest production of Chinese interrogatives and the lowest production of English ones, whereas the pattern that both parents only speak English had the highest production of English interrogatives; and (5) the ‘one-parent-one-language’ pattern was found to have a balanced but reduced production of Chinese and English interrogatives, indicating a subtractive bilingualism in Singapore preschoolers.

Home Environment, Bilingual Preschooler's Receptive Mother Tongue Language Outcomes, and Social-Emotional and Behavioral Skills: One Stone for Two Birds?

The current study seeks to illustrate the relationships between child bilinguals’ mother tongue language (MTL) exposure and reading activities at home, children’s receptive MTL proficiency, and their socio-emotional and behavioral skills (SEBS). Data from 202 Singapore preschoolers (4–5 years old) who are learning English and Mandarin were analyzed. A parental questionnaire and standard Mandarin tests (i.e., receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar) were used to assess children’s Mandarin language-literacy environment at home, as well as their receptive language skills in Mandarin. Children’s SEBS were evaluated with the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ) (parental version). A series of variables which might influence SEBS and MTL proficiency (e.g., gender and SES) were controlled and SEMs were used to conduct data analysis. Results demonstrated that both Mandarin language and literacy environmental factors are related to children’s receptive language outcomes in Mandarin, while only literacy environmental factors associate with children’s difficulty level, and prosocial skills. This suggests that good parental support in bilingual children’s MTL literacy should be promoted not only for the sake of their early language development but also because of the potential benefits to their social emotional wellbeing.

Chinese preschoolers' acquisition of temporal adverbs indicating past, present, and future: a corpus-based study.

This study investigated the development of temporal adverbs in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of temporal adverbs indicating the past, present, and future were extracted from the Early Child Mandarin Corpus (168 children in four age groups: 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, 5;6). Data analyses indicated: (1) Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 21 types of temporal adverbs, and the children in the first age group (M = 2;6) were capable of using temporal adverbs to denote past, present, and future events; (2) within each age group, the children produced significantly more future temporal adverbs than the other two subtypes; and (3) there was a significant age effect that, with increased age, more children were able to produce all subtypes of temporal adverbs. Overall, findings of this corpus-based investigation shed light upon Chinese children's early-attained ability to express the three fundamental notions of time by resorting to the appropriate linguistic devices.

Grammatical Aspect in Early Child Mandarin: Evidence from a Preferential Looking Experiment.

The study assessed 30-month-old Mandarin-speaking children's awareness of aspectual distinctions involving the perfective marker le and the imperfective marker zhe in a preferential looking experiment. In the experiment, we presented our child subjects with a choice between two video clips (one depicting a closed event and the other depicting an on-going event), in the presence of an auditory stimulus (either the le sentence, the zhe sentence or the control sentence without any aspect marker). Children's looking behavior in the task was recorded and analyzed. The results revealed 30-month-old children's emerging sensitivity to the aspectual contrast between le and zhe. This was manifest by an increase in looking to the closed event when hearing the le sentence and an increase in looking to the on-going event when hearing the zhe sentence. The absence of le or zhe in the control sentence did not result in any increase or decrease in looking to either event. We also found that the effect of le on children's looking behavior was immediate whereas the effect of zhe was late. We attributed this difference to the facilitative role of le in children's sentence processing as well as their preference for the event boundary. The results lend support to the continuity view that functional morphemes like aspect markers are available to children early in language development.