This study investigated how a representative sample of 492 Cantonese-speaking children aged 36, 48 and 60 months expressed time during naturalistic conversations with peers. Spontaneous utterances produced by dyads of children in a 30-minute role-play context were collected, transcribed and analyzed. A productive repertoire of 62 nouns, 69 adverbs and 9 aspects was identified and classified into an appropriate typology. An age-related increase in types of temporal noun and adverb and repertoire size was found. It was also discovered that three-year-olds might already possess knowledge of aspect markers even though they might not be able to produce temporal nouns about “season” and “week” before 4 or 5 years of age. Some instances of double aspectual marking and misplacing aspects were found in the expressions. Linguistic, cognitive and conversational influences presumed to shape performance are discussed together with the implications of the findings for early childhood language education.
Tang, Tempo Po-Yi, Yu-Yin Hsu, Dustin Kai-Yan Lau & Man-Tak Leung
2024. Content-Form Interaction in the Acquisition of Temporal Markers by Mandarin-Speaking Children. SAGE Open 14:1
Tang, Tempo Po-Yi, Dustin Kai-Yan Lau & Man-Tak Leung
2023. Corpus of Mandarin Child Language: a preliminary study on the acquisition of semantic content categories in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Li, Hui, Luyao Liang & Dandan Wu
2022. Predicting Chinese Preschoolers’ Acquisition of Aspect Markers: A Corpus-Based Study. Languages 7:2 ► pp. 133 ff.
Song, Xue-Ke, Cassandra Lee & Wing-Chee So
2022. Examining Phenotypical Heterogeneity in Language Abilities in Chinese-Speaking Children with Autism: A Naturalistic Sampling Approach. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 52:5 ► pp. 1908 ff.
Tsung, Linda & Yang Frank Gong
2021. A Corpus-Based Study on the Pragmatic Use of the ba Construction in Early Childhood Mandarin Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology 11
Tsung, Linda & Dandan Wu
2021. A Corpus-Based Comparison of the Pragmatic Use of Qian and Hou to Examine the Applicability of Space–Time Metaphor Hypothesis in Early Child Mandarin. Frontiers in Psychology 11
LIANG, Lu Yao, Dandan WU & Hui LI
2019. Chinese preschoolers’ acquisition of temporal adverbs indicating past, present, and future: a corpus-based study. Journal of Child Language 46:04 ► pp. 760 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.