1st Edition

Early Language Acquisition of Mandarin-Speaking Children

By Yunqiu Zhang Copyright 2020
    296 Pages 39 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    296 Pages 39 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Compared with other subdisciplines in Chinese linguistics, children’s language acquisition is a significant field with relatively limited achievements. Based on data from a dynamic and developmental corpus, this book is a comprehensive exploration of the early development of Chinese-speaking children’s language acquisition.
       Anchoring the discussions regarding phonetics, semantics and aspects of syntax in a cognitive and functional framework, the author conducts an in-depth analysis of many acquisition characteristics, such as the inevitable and incidental errors of their learning of initials; their ability to obtain the concept of time at a young age and the utilization of Le in the expression of the past tense; their understanding of subjectivity at a young age and the ability to express it; their learning of the degree of modality following the order of from probability to necessity; and children’s acquisition of syntactic structures being impacted by genetics and also affected by the steps involved in syntactic processing. Although genetics, cognition and experience all play a role in children’s language acquisition, this book focuses on the role of cognitive functions.
       By successfully explaining the acquisition rules based on some cutting-edge linguistic theories, the book will certainly be beneficial to scholars studying linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and early childhood educators.

    List of figures.  List of tables.  Acknowledgements.  1 Introduction  2 A Phonetic Investigation of the Acquisition and Development of Primary Vowels  3 Deviation Phenomena in the Acquisition of Initials  4 Acoustic Analyses of Tone Acquisition and Related Errors  5 Acquisition of Locative Words Relating to "Up" and "Down"  6 The Onset of Time Consciousness – the Acquisition of Le 了  7 Acquisition and Development of Expressions of Subjectivization  8 Early Acquisition of Degrees of Modality  9 Acquisition of the Zai 在Construction  10 Early Acquisition and Development of the Ditransitive Construction  11 Acquisition of Simplex Relative Clauses  References.  Index

    Biography

    Yunqiu Zhang is a professor of linguistics and applied linguistics at the School of Arts of Capital Normal University. Her main research interest include children’s language acquisition and research regarding cognitive grammar in Chinese.