Chinese Language Development Of Uyghur Preschool Children From 3 To 6 Years Old

In the past few decades, the study on minority preschool children second language development attracted lots of attention from researchers and obtained certain achievements. However, it is still rare on the study about the minority children whose second language is Chinese. And the existing research also lack of systematic study on the question, namely the system of semantic, grammar and pragmatic as a whole.This study aims to explore Uyghur children Chinese language development rules and characteristics based on the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). In this study, we choose totaling 80 Uyghur pre-school children, aged from 3-6, try to explore their Chinese lexicon, syntax and communicative acts, analysis their Chinese language lexicon, syntactic and pragmatic development situation, reveal Uyghur children Chinese language development process.The research results are divided into three parts:The study on Uyghur children Chinese lexicon development shows that in overall and various word classes the development tendency goes from less to more significantly as age rising. There appears an unbalanced development on word type and word frequency. The early Chinese vocabulary development shows certain order, in specific:there is a Chinese lexicon sequence, namely noun is the first according to total number, followed by verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, classifier and aspect particle. The Main word subclass internal development has certain order. In addition, there exists errors when Uyghur children product and use Chinese words. And the errors rises as age growth, namely high age group make more vocabulary errors than low age group do. In all kinds of errors, word class generalization has the highest percentage. The different errors types go differently as children age developed.The study on Uyghur children Chinese syntactic development focus on their Chinese sentences development characteristics, namely from the depth of quantity and quality the two perspectives to find out Uyghur children Chinese syntactic characteristics. Research found that on the quantity, Uyghur children's MLU and MLU5 are showed a trend of increase with age, and in 4-5 year the growth is most obvious. On quality, the development in Uyghur children Chinese sentence experienced from simple to complex, the modified level develops gradually as age growth. On sentence function, declarative statements growth is the most significant, followed by questions. Imperative sentence and exclamatory sentences do not change significantly. There are errors exist in the development of Uyghur children Chinese syntactic, and with children age rising, Chinese syntactic errors increase gradually in number. In type, missing components and multiple errors are the most common. Different syntax errors internal present different characteristics.The study on Uyghur children communicative acts found that at age 3-6 children Chinese communicative acts have the obvious growth at all levels. Along with the age, Uyghur children Chinese language interpretable communicative attempts gradually increase, speech participation develop, social interchanges grow, speech acts constantly enrich. At the same time pragmatic flexibilities also increasingly varied. Uyghur children social interchanges types have a fundamental development order in the four main internal systems, that is, discuss, negotiate, marking and meta communication. Meanwhile, Chinese speech acts also have certain development sequence in different functional form category, such as question and response system, directive system, representation system, designation system, evaluation system and so on. In communicative acts development, there exist high frequency using of certain social interchanges type and speech acts type.The above three parts of research outline the basic laws of development and characteristics of Uyghur children Chinese language. Namely the Uyghur children Chinese language development shows similarity in path as the Han peers:the age trend, gradualness, unbalance, certain order and existing basic communication acts. But there is a difference in development rate. Uyghur children lag behind Han peers in Chinese vocabulary, individual of speech, sentence structure development, pragmatic communication form and flexibility, and questions ability. These lag behind are Uyghur children special needs in their Chinese study. Meanwhile, the errors appeared in Uyghur children Chinese study require educators to pay close attention to in the teaching practice.The above research conclusions are all based on CHILDES. This study confirmed CHILDES can reflect the true state of minority children Chinese language development with the data captured from the ecological situation. With the computer analysis technology of language database, minority children's Chinese language development characteristics and regularity can be presented before us. Meanwhile, the data of Uyghur children Chinese language development will also extend the database of international bilingual study.