A corpus-based study of reduplication in Cantonese-speaking children aged 1;10 to 6;0

Abstract

This is a preliminary descriptive study investigating the use of reduplication in preschool Cantonese-speaking children in Hong Kong. Cross-sectional data and longitudinal data from the Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus were analyzed. The results show that nearly all children use reduplication during early language development, particularly reduplicated noun, in their conversational speech, with a peak at the age of 1;11 to 2;08. Repetition of monosyllabic words, which is the major pattern observed, has a potential in facilitating segmentation of words in child-directed speech and promote early stage of vocabulary development. Dominance of high tones in the reduplication words also reflects the potential bias in segmenting and producing reduplication with the distinctive tone height. Meanwhile, weak relationship between the use of reduplication in children and that in adults was observed. Also, the use of reduplication is not likely to be related to age or length of utterance. These suggest the possibility that children develop their own way of reduplication for lexical learning as language develops. Hence the use of reduplication persists over the preschool period and it is not likely to facilitate the syntactic development in Cantonese-speaking children.