Syntactic development of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in Beijing : trends and contributors

Abstract

Abstract

SYNTACTIC DEVELOPMENT OF MANDARIN-SPEAKING PRESCHOOLERS IN BEIJING: TRENDS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Mandarin is the official language in Beijing where the children have to acquire the language in preschool years. This thesis examines the developmental trend and contributing factors to the Mandarin syntactic development in Beijing preschoolers. A total of 192 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers from 8 different preschools are recruited. They are paired up to participate in a 30-minute semi-structured free play context so to collect their authentic speech produced. The videotapes are transcribed and coded in order to investigate the trend of Mean Length of Utterance in characters (MLUc), sentence types and syntactic structure of declaratives for each child in relation to their age and gender. One parent of each participating child completes the Home Language Environment Survey (HLES) that provides information of parental education, parental engagement, home literacy practice, television watching, multilingualism and after school programmes.

MANOVAs and Hierarchical Multiple Regression Analyses reveal that age is a significant contributor to the variation of MLU in children. Gender differences are insignificant but boys show a slightly higher MLU than girls in all age group and settings except in the 4.5 years same-sex dyads. Boys also outperform girls slightly in many analyses of syntactic complexity of declaratives while the contrary is observed in some of the analysis in the 4.5 years age group. This finding is coherent with the previous findings of age effect in MLU. The gender effect is discussed in relation to the Chinese culture of valuing boys more and the sudden growth spurt of children at around 4-5 years old. Watching educational television programmes is shown to be significantly correlated to children’s MLU development. This supports the previous findings of the beneficial value of educational television programmes on children’s language development. HLES demonstrates that boys in general receive more parental engagement, participates in more home literacy practices like storybook reading and recognizing Chinese characters activities with parents. They also own more children’s books at home and visit the bookstore and library to borrow or buy books more frequently. Boys spend more time watching educational television programmes with their parents and more of the boys participate in after school programs. All these factors in the language environment that favours boys might be the contributors to boys’ more outstanding performance in MLU and other syntactic developmental trends.

As a large-scale study of early childhood Mandarin acquisition in Beijing, this study allows a unique perspective on early syntactic acquisition and its contributors. It provides empirical evidence to the predominant theoretical confrontations about the confounded connections among child development, language and society and the relationship between “nature versus nurture” in language acquisition. Moreover, this study will add to the development of standards and instruments for preschool Mandarin, norms in early language acquisition of Chinese, curriculum planning of early Mandarin education and teacher training programs.