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Young Mandarin learners use function words to distinguish between nouns and verbs
Weiyi Ma1, Peng Zhou2, Roberta M Golinkoff3
1School of Human Environmental Sciences, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA.
Developmental Science
|December 4, 2019
Summary
Mandarin-speaking children aged 3-5 can use function words to identify new nouns and verbs. Five-year-olds successfully distinguished word types, while three-year-olds primarily learned nouns, indicating a developmental progression in syntactic bootstrapping.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Language Acquisition
Background:
- Mandarin lacks determiners and inflections, posing challenges for syntactic bootstrapping.
- Children typically use function words to infer word classes (e.g., nouns, verbs).
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate Mandarin-speaking children's ability to use function words for word class identification.
- To determine the age at which this ability develops in Mandarin learners.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: 3- and 5-year-olds exposed to novel words in sentence frames with distinct form class markers.
- Experiment 2: Confirmed 5-year-olds' understanding of verb-marker function.
Main Results:
- Five-year-olds correctly interpreted novel words as nouns or verbs based on context.
- Three-year-olds predominantly learned novel words as nouns.
- Five-year-olds demonstrated understanding of the verb-marker's role.
Conclusions:
- Mandarin-speaking children can utilize function words for syntactic bootstrapping.
- The ability to distinguish nouns and verbs using function words emerges between 3 and 5 years of age.
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