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Article: Syntactic awareness of Cantonese-speaking children

TitleSyntactic awareness of Cantonese-speaking children
Authors
KeywordsChildren and youth - about linguistics psychology
Issue Date2001
PublisherCambridge University Press. The Journal's web site is located at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JCL
Citation
Journal of Child Language, 2001, v. 28 n. 2, p. 703-739 How to Cite?
AbstractThe development of metalinguistic awareness, and specifically syntactic awareness, (here measured by age-related changes in the ability to judge and revise unacceptable sentences), reflects developmental changes in focus from semantic to syntactic properties of sentences. Previous research reported that children find judgements of word-order changes easier than morphological violations (Hakes, 1980). We hypothesized that this difference in ease of judgement is linked to the language under investigation. That is, there may be a relationship between the functional load of grammatical morphemes and ability to detect syntactic violations. This study investigated the development of syntactic awareness in Cantonese-speaking children. Fifty-six subjects from four age groups (three, five, seven and 20 years old) were asked to judge the grammaticality of 40 sentences (18 with word-order changes and 22 with morphological violations) and correct the grammatically deviant sentences. There was a significant age effect on subjects’ performance in both judgement and revision tasks. Children scored significantly higher in judging sentences with word order changes than those with morphological violations. They also scored higher on word order revisions than morphological revisions, an unexpected finding. The success of correcting morphological violations varied by morphological marker, apparently according to each marker's degree of obligatory use in the language. It would seem then that syntactic awareness is very much affected by language-specific characteristics.
Persistent Identifierhttp://hdl.handle.net/10722/43496
ISSN
2023 Impact Factor: 1.7
2023 SCImago Journal Rankings: 0.990

 

DC FieldValueLanguage
dc.contributor.authorTsang, KSen_HK
dc.contributor.authorStokes, SFen_HK
dc.date.accessioned2007-03-23T04:47:08Z-
dc.date.available2007-03-23T04:47:08Z-
dc.date.issued2001en_HK
dc.identifier.citationJournal of Child Language, 2001, v. 28 n. 2, p. 703-739en_HK
dc.identifier.issn0305-0009en_HK
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10722/43496-
dc.description.abstractThe development of metalinguistic awareness, and specifically syntactic awareness, (here measured by age-related changes in the ability to judge and revise unacceptable sentences), reflects developmental changes in focus from semantic to syntactic properties of sentences. Previous research reported that children find judgements of word-order changes easier than morphological violations (Hakes, 1980). We hypothesized that this difference in ease of judgement is linked to the language under investigation. That is, there may be a relationship between the functional load of grammatical morphemes and ability to detect syntactic violations. This study investigated the development of syntactic awareness in Cantonese-speaking children. Fifty-six subjects from four age groups (three, five, seven and 20 years old) were asked to judge the grammaticality of 40 sentences (18 with word-order changes and 22 with morphological violations) and correct the grammatically deviant sentences. There was a significant age effect on subjects’ performance in both judgement and revision tasks. Children scored significantly higher in judging sentences with word order changes than those with morphological violations. They also scored higher on word order revisions than morphological revisions, an unexpected finding. The success of correcting morphological violations varied by morphological marker, apparently according to each marker's degree of obligatory use in the language. It would seem then that syntactic awareness is very much affected by language-specific characteristics.en_HK
dc.format.extent1653362 bytes-
dc.format.extent25600 bytes-
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf-
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/msword-
dc.languageengen_HK
dc.publisherCambridge University Press. The Journal's web site is located at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JCLen_HK
dc.rightsJournal of Child Language. Copyright © Cambridge University Press.en_HK
dc.subjectChildren and youth - about linguistics psychologyen_HK
dc.titleSyntactic awareness of Cantonese-speaking childrenen_HK
dc.typeArticleen_HK
dc.identifier.openurlhttp://library.hku.hk:4550/resserv?sid=HKU:IR&issn=0305-0009&volume=28&issue=2&spage=703&epage=739&date=2001&atitle=Syntactic+awareness+of+Cantonese-speaking+childrenen_HK
dc.description.naturepublished_or_final_versionen_HK
dc.identifier.doi10.1017/S0305000901004822en_HK
dc.identifier.scopuseid_2-s2.0-0035496018-
dc.identifier.hkuros58016-
dc.identifier.issnl0305-0009-

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