The impact of home language input on early Chinese classifier acquisition: a corpus-based study on the Mandarin-speaking children in Beijing

Abstract

Classifier is a distinctive characteristic of Chinese languages that quantifies and enumerates the referents by its explicit features (Erbaugh, 2004). Many studies (Loke & Harrison, 1986; Tsang, Chambers, 2011; Tse, Li, & Leung, 2007) have been conducted to explore the acquisition of Chinese classifier, whereas very few (Yang, & Zhou, 2010) were done to investigate the impact of home language input on it. This study is dedicated to understanding the relationship between home language input and the attainment of Chinese classifier using the Early Mandarin Corpus. The corpus collected the natural speech produced by 150 Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers in Beijing who were paired and participated in a 30 minute videotaping free play. All the classifiers were elicited and analysed. This poster will report the following results: (1) the developmental trends of Chinese classifier acquisition, including Age and Gender difference in Mandarin-speaking children; (2) the differences in home language environment and home language input will be analysed; and (3) hierarchical regression analyses will be conducted to understand the contribution of home language input to the attainment of Chinese classifier in the early years. Last, the educational implications of these findings will be addressed to provide valuable suggestions to early childhood educators and researchers interested in teaching Chinese as the 1st and 2nd language.