The Acquisition Order Of Wh-questions Of A Mandarin-speaking Child

The research focuses on a case study of a mandarin-speaking child’s acquisition order of wh-questions. The author asked her sister in law to record a mandarin-speaking child named Zhao Yinuo, whose records were done once a week, and half an hour every time. Zhao Yinuo was recorded from1;3years old to2;3years old. Then the audio files were sent to the author by her mother. The author transcribed the data and did analysis, expecting to find her acquisition order of wh-questions.6,000sentences were recorded totally.Nowadays relevant study in China was seldom founded, especially case studies. The aim of our study is to find acquisition order of wh-questions for mandarin-speaking child, which means a lot for the study of the process of child’s language acquisition. According to our analysis, the author found that the order of mandarin-speaking child’s acquisition of wh-questions is:"what" questions,"which" questions,"who" questions,"where" questions,"whose" questions,"how many" questions,"how" questions,"why" questions and "when" questions. This finding is consistent with other studies in other languages.There exist many kinds of explanations about this kind of acquisition order. For example, Ervin-Tripp et al (1970) holds that this kind of acquisition order is determind by acquisition complexity, syntactic complexity and syntactic function of wh-words in wh-questions. Bloom et al (1933) observed that it is syntactic function of wh-words, the selected verbs in wh-questions and the uses of wh-questions that determine the order. Smith M (1933) thinks that the order is determined by sex, age and situation. Chen Min (2008) holds that it is the result of language input.Upon the explanations mentioned above, the author explained it from the point view of universal grammar other than the amount of language input.In the end of this paper, some explanations were proposed for further study.