Study On Mandarin-speaking Children’s Early Acquisition Process Of Quantifiers

Acquisition of quantifier is an essential topic in Child linguistics.Scholars in China and abroad have studied and put forward their own ideals.Ying Houchang(1983)stated the degree that children acquire quantifiers is not in balance but in sequence.Children will acquire individual quantifiers first,and then temporary quantifiers and collective quantifiers.Ding lingyun(1999)studied children’s production of quantifiers by long-time tracking survey and found that the earliest quantifiers acquired are individual quantifiers,and then collective quantifiers and temporary quantifiers.This study focuses on the sequence of children’s quantifier acquisition,acquisition rules and factors affecting children’s acquisition of quantifiers.The process of children’s quantifier acquisition are discussed comprehensively.longitudinal study,experimental research,data analysis of statistics and literature review are employed to study children named MHR(female),ZHZ(male)and ZZC(male).16 observation points are selected from MHR(01;03;26-03;02;08),ZHZ(01;03;25-03;01;18)and ZZC(01;03;00—03;00;16)respectively,counting data by taking six month as a section.Due to the limitation of children’s age and corpus,an experimental study is used in this thesis in order to avoid the limitation.The researchers randomly choose 150 children aged from 3 to 6 in The Kindergarten of Changsha University of Science&Technology as subjects for the experimental research.And author divided children into three stages according their age,like 3-4,4-5 and 5-6.Quantifiers are classified according to li Yuming’s(1994)classification criterion:individual quantifiers(such as "ge4,zhil,tiao2"),temporary quantifiers(such as "baol,chel,wan3"),collective quantifiers(such as "qun2,shuangl,dui4").Data sorted out in this way to be analyzed for children’s acquisition of quantifiers.The results as follows:(1)The sequence of children’s quantifier acquisition is:individual quantifiers→temporary quantifiers→collective quantifiers;individual quantifiers are the earliest acquired and then are collective quantifiers and temporary quantifiers.(2)There exists characteristics and rules during the process of children’s quantifier acquisition.(3)There is a misuse phenomenon in children’s acquisition process of quantifiers because of the limitation of cognitive level,overgeneralization phenomenon,misuse of borrowing quantifiers.The author hopes to find some characteristics and rules of children’s quantifier acquisition through above analysis,and give some explanations for some problems that appear in the process of children’s acquisition of quantifiers,which is significant for children’s language development..