Syntactic cues to the noun and verb distinction in Mandarin child-directed speech

The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word’s form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner (a/an/the), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:First language 2019-08, Vol.39 (4), p.433-461
Main Authors: Ma, Weiyi, Zhou, Peng, Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick, Lee, Joanne, Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age Differences
Age of acquisition
Child-directed speech
Computational Linguistics
Correlation
Cues
Form Classes (Languages)
Grammar
Infants
Inflection (Morphology)
Language Acquisition
Language Usage
Mandarin
Mandarin Chinese
Morphology (Languages)
Morphosyntax
Mothers
Native Language
Nouns
Parent Child Relationship
Parents & parenting
Predictor Variables
Sentence structure
Syntactic structures
Syntax
Toddlers
Verbs
Word Frequency
Word meaning
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Summary:The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word’s form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner (a/an/the), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in identifying a word’s form class and thus glean some information about its meaning. This study examined whether Mandarin, a language that has a relatively impoverished morphosyntactic system, offers reliable morphosyntactic cues to the noun–verb distinction in child-directed speech (CDS). Using the CHILDES Beijing corpora, Study 1 found that Mandarin CDS has reliable morphosyntactic markers to the noun–verb distinction. Study 2 examined the relationship between mothers’ use of a set of early-acquired nouns and verbs in the Beijing corpora and the age of acquisition (AoA) of these words. Results showed that the occurrence of the form class markers is a reliable predictor of the AoA for the early-acquired nouns and verbs.
ISSN:0142-7237
1740-2344
DOI:10.1177/0142723719845175