A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese-speaking Children’s Acquisition Of Questions

Children’s acquisition of language is a complex process and researchersboth abroad and in China have put forward many hypotheses about how childrenacquire the language. The language itself and the development of brain makechildren’s acquisition of language mysterious. The research on children’sacquisition of language has developed greatly and crossed disciplines such aslinguistics, psychology and pedagogy for the last twenty years. Questionsoccupy a large portion in any language, which makes it a valuable researchsubject. Children’s acquisition of questions can not only show how well theyacquire the language but also reflect the level of their thinking abilities.Two Chinese-speaking children are observed longitudinally to get the dataand at the same time two English-speaking children are chosen at random fromBrowm Corpus to get the data needed in the present study. The selected data areclassified and counted to help analyze the features and orders of bothChinese-speaking and English-children’s acquisition of yes-no questions,alternative questions and wh-questions.The result shows as follows: (1) the frequency of Chinese-speakingchildren producing wh-quesitons is higher than that of yes-no questions andalternative questions. The wh-questions with interrogative words shen2me andna3li3 are produced frequently higher than any other wh-questions. However,the English-speaking children produce yes-no question the most, of which the inverted structures occupy the biggest portion. The wh-questions with wh-wordswhat and where are produced the most; (2) the order of Chinese-speakingchildren’s acquisition of questions is as follows: wh-questions→alternativequestions→yes-no questions. However, the order of English-speaking children’sacquisition of questions is as follows: yes-no questions→wh-questions→alternative questions; (3) the Chinese-speaking children make fewer mistakesthan English-speaking children do during the production of questions, but themistakes decrease when the English-speaking children get older. Both theChinese-speaking children and English-speaking children acquire the positiveforms of questions first and then the negative forms, and they both compoundyes-no questions, wh-questions and alternative questions together according totheir needs when they have acquired the questions. The frequency of producingwh-questions is high in both children. The factors that cause the similarities anddifferences lie in as follows: (1) language structures; (2) cognitive competence;(3) language input; (4) acquisition strategy.