Developmental pathways for first language acquisition of Mandarin nominal expressions: Comparing monolingual with simultaneous Mandarin-English bilingual children

Meiyun Chang-Smith*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    4 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    This comparative study explores the first language acquisition of Mandarin nominal expressions by monolingual and simultaneous Mandarin-English bilingual children, with the aim of contributing new data relevant to the autonomous vs. interdependent debate in bilingual first language acquisition. More specifically, it focuses on the developmental sequences of complex definite and indefinite nominal expressions in the forms of [demonstrative + numeral + classifier + noun] and [numeral + classifier + noun] respectively, comparing both qualitatively and quantitatively the developmental pathways and time progres- sion observed in corpora derived from two longitudinal studies. The bilingual corpus analyzed consists of an extensive daily record of utterances from age 10 months to 33 months, while the monolingual corpus is derived from a set of eight video recorded sessions spanning the age range from 20 months to 26 months. The outcomes provide support for the Autonomous Development Hypothesis, to the extent that the developmental pathway of Mandarin nominal expressions as elaborated in the bilingual child's case is found to be highly comparable with that of the monolingual counterpart and that up to the end of the observation period no apparent transfers from English nominal syntax to Mandarin were observed.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)11-35
    Number of pages25
    JournalInternational Journal of Bilingualism
    Volume14
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2010

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