Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T19:03:34.278Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Early vocabulary development in Mandarin (Putonghua) and Cantonese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2009

TWILA TARDIF ,
PAUL FLETCHER ,
WEILAN LIANG  and
NIKO KACIROTI
TWILA TARDIF*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
PAUL FLETCHER
Affiliation:
University College Cork
WEILAN LIANG
Affiliation:
Peking University First Hospital
NIKO KACIROTI
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
Address for correspondence: Twila Tardif, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Parent report instruments adapted from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) examined vocabulary development in children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6 for two Chinese languages, Mandarin (n=1694) and Cantonese (n=1625). Parental reports suggested higher overall scores for Mandarin- than for Cantonese-speaking children from approximately 1 ; 4 onward. Factors relevant to the difference were only-child status, monolingual households and caregiver education. In addition to the comparison of vocabulary scores overall, the development of noun classifiers, grammatical function words common to the two languages, was assessed both in terms of the age and the vocabulary size at which these terms are acquired. Whereas age-based developmental trajectories again showed an advantage for Beijing children, Hong Kong children used classifiers when they had smaller vocabularies, reflecting the higher frequencies and greater precision of classifier use in adult Cantonese. The data speak to the importance of using not just age, but also vocabulary size, as a metric by which the acquisition of particular linguistic elements can be examined across languages.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2009 , pp. 1115 - 1144
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research would not have been possible without the assistance of more than 3,000 families and over 50 research assistants. We acknowledge funding for the project from a Hong Kong government Earmarked grant for research (#HKU 7158/99H) to Dr Paul Fletcher and NSF grant # BCS-0350272 to Dr Twila Tardif. In addition, we thank Tracy Chan, Kawai Leung, Shirley Leung and Sam Leung in Hong Kong and Bo Hao, Qicheng Jing, Zhixiang Zhang and Qihua Zuo in Beijing for their unfailing commitment and support at various stages of this project.

References

REFERENCES

Bauer, R. S. & Benedict, P. K. (1997). Modern Cantonese phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bornstein, M. H., Cote, L. R., Maital, S., Painter, K., Park, S. Y., Pascual, L., Pecheux, M. G., Ruel, J., Venuti, P. & Vyt, A. (2004). Cross-linguistic analysis of vocabulary in young children: Spanish, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and American English. Child Development 75(4), 1115–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Caselli, M. C., Bates, E., Casadio, P., Fenson, J., Fenson, L., Sanderl, l. & Weir, J. (1995). A cross-lingustic study of early language development. Cognitive Development 10, 159–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caselli, M. C., Casadio, P. & Bates, E. (1999). A comparison of the transition from first words to grammar in English and Italian. Journal of Child Language 26, 69–111.Google Scholar
Chien, Y.-C., Lust, B. & Chiang, C.-P. (2003). Chinese children's comprehension of count-classifiers and mass classifiers. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 12, 91–120.Google Scholar
Dale, P. S. & Fenson, L. (1996). Lexical development norms for young children. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers 28, 125–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Houwer, A., Bornstein, M. H. & Leach, D. B. (2005). Assessing early communicative ability: A cross-reporter cumulative score for the MacArthur CDI. Journal of Child Language 32, 735–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Duanmu, S. (2000). The phonology of standard Chinese. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Erbaugh, M. (2006). Chinese classifiers: Their use and acquisition. In Li, P., Tan, L. H., Bates, E. & Tzeng, O. J. L. (eds), Handbook of East Asian Psycholingusitics. Volume 1: Chinese, 39–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J. S., Bates, E., Thal, D. & Pethick, S. (1994). Variability in early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 59 (5, Serial No. 242).Google Scholar
Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J. S., Thal, D., Bates, E., Hartung, J., Pethick, S. & Reilly, J. (1993). MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: User's guide and technical manual. San Diego: Singular Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Fletcher, P., Leung, S. C.-S., Stokes, S. F. & Weizman, Z. O. (2000). Cantonese pre-school language development: A guide. Hong Kong: Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Hart, B. & Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing.Google Scholar
Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). The relation of birth order and socioeconomic status to children's language experience and language development. Applied Psycholinguistics 19, 603–629.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W. & Bryk, A. (1991). Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology 27, 236–48.Google Scholar
Jackson-Maldonado, D., Thal, D., Marchman, V., Bates, E. & Gutierrez-Clellen, V. (1993). Early lexical development in Spanish-speaking infants and toddlers. Journal of Child Language 20, 523–49.Google Scholar
Jing, Q., Wan, C. & Over, R. (1984). Single-child family in China: Psychological perspectives. International Journal of Psychology 22, 127–38.Google Scholar
Klee, T., Stokes, S. F., Wong, A. M.-Y., Fletcher, P. & Gavin, W. J. (2004). Utterance length and lexical diversity in Cantonese-speaking children with and without specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47, 1396–410.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lee, T. H.-T., Wong, C. H., Leung, C. S., Man, P., Cheung, A., Szeto, K. & Wong, C. S.-P. (eds) (1994), The development of grammatical competence in Cantonese-speaking children: Report of Hong Kong RGC AQ9 Ear-marked grant, 1991–1994 Unpublished manuscript, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N. T., Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Li, C. N. & Thompson, S. A. (1981). Mandarin: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. (1994). The LSHK Cantonese romanization scheme. Hong Kong: Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Ma, W., Golinkoff, R. M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., McDonough, C. & Tardif, T. (in press). Imageability predicts the age of acquisition of verbs in Chinese children. Journal of Child Language.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Maital, S., Dromi, E., Sagi, A. & Bornstein, M. (2000). The Hebrew Communicative Development Inventory: Language-specific properties and cross-lingusitic generalisations. Journal of Child Language 27, 43–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matthews, S. & Yip, V. (1994). Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Patterson, J. (2004). Comparing bilingual and monolingual toddlers' expressive vocabulary size: Revisiting Rescorla and Achenbach (2002). Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 45, 1213–17.Google Scholar
Pine, J. M., Lieven, E. V. M. & Rowland, C. (1996). Observational and checklist measures of vocabulary: What do they mean? Journal of Child Language 23, 573–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramsey, S. R. (1987). The languages of China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rescorla, L. & Achenbach, T. M. (2002). Use of the Language Development Survey (LDS) in a national probability sample of children 18 to 35 months old. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 45, 733–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rice, M. L. & Oetting, J. B. (1993). Morphological deficits of children with SLI: Evaluation of number marking and agreement. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 1249–57.Google Scholar
Snow, D. (2004). Cantonese as written language: The growth of a written Chinese vernacular. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press.Google Scholar
Storkel, H. (2001). Learning new words: Phonotactic probability in language impairment. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Reseach 44, 1321–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Storkel, H. (2004). Do children acquire dense neighbourhoods? An investigation of similarity neighbourhoods in lexical acquisition. Applied Psycholingusitics 25, 201–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tang, S.-W., Kwok, F., Lee, T. H.-T., Lun, C., Luke, K.-K., Tung, P. & Cheung, K.-H. (2002). Guide to LSHK Cantonese romanization of Chinese characters, 2nd ed. Hong Kong: Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Tardif, T. (1996). Nouns are not always learned before verbs: Evidence from Mandarin speakers' early vocabularies. Developmental Psychology 32, 492–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tardif, T., Fletcher, P., Zhang, Z. X. & Liang, W. L. (2008). The Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (Putonghua and Cantonese versions): Manual, Forms, and Norms. Beijing: Peking University Medical Press.Google Scholar
Tardif, T., Gelman, S. A. & Xu, F. (1999). Putting the ‘noun bias’ in context: A comparison of Mandarin and English. Child Development 70, 620–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tardif, T., Shatz, M. & Naigles, L. (1997). Caregiver speech and children's use of nouns versus verbs: A comparison of English, Italian, and Mandarin. Journal of Child Language 24, 535–65.Google Scholar
Thordardottir, E. T. & Weismer, S. E. (1996). Language assessment via parent report: Development of a screening instrument for Icelandic children. First Language 16, 265–85.Google Scholar
van Hulle, C. A., Goldsmith, H. H. & Lemery, K. S. (2004). Genetic, environmental, and gender effects on individual differences in toddler expressive language. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47(4), 904–912.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed