| The establishment of syntactic system is a very important part of language acquisition. Languagehas the rules, and children have to build their languages followed the rules. So, the most important partof syntactic acquisition is how to learn grammatical cagegories. As the basis of the sentence andgrammatical rules, grammatical cagegories are the most basic units of the syntax. With the knowledgeof cagegory, children can understand the sentences, and speak out their own sentences. We concern onhow children learn the grammatical categories at the very beginning.During the course of acquisition, their lexicon is established one item by one item by memory.When children are learning a lexical item, they need to assign it to the specific grammatical category,like noun, verb, adverb and so on. But we don't know how children complete the assignment. We areinterested in the underlying learning mechanism and determinant factors.There are three main theories about how infants acquire grammatical category: SemanticBootstrapping, Phonological Bootstrapping and Distributional Bootstrapping. Standing at DistributionalBootstrapping, this thesis focus on whether Chinese infants categorize nouns and verbs based on thedistributional cues.Nouns and verbs are the basic categories. And they are the first word classes to which children areexposed and acquire. Therefore, the study of the acquisition of nouns and verbs is very essential. So far,there are some researches about infants' categorization of nouns and verbs in German, French andEnglish, infants of these languages cagegorized nouns and verbs by distributional cues of morphology.Chinese is different with these western languages. First, Chinese has many ambiguous words, such as"yan2jiu1(research/to research), diao4cha2(investigation/investigate), gan3shou4(feeling/feel). Thesewords can be used as nouns and verbs without any changes of morphology or phonetics. Theseambiguous words make it difficult for infants to cagegorize the words. Second, Chinese is lack ofmorphology. Function words and affix are abundant in English and French, so infants can cagegorizewords by morphological contexts like affix. But there is no morphology in Chinese, and words have noaffix or determiner. So, as lack of morphology, how Chinese infants learn grammatical cagegory?The acquisition of nouns and verbs by Mandarin-learning children hasn't been explored. Therefore,the thesis focuses on the mechanism of the acquisition of noun word class and verb word class byMandarin-learning children.The thesis first analyzed the distributional pattern of nouns and verbs in parents' input. Thepatterns are as follows:1) in the input, a lexical item is seldom used as both noun and verb even thoughit can be used like that in adult-to-adult language.2) Some nouns and verbs will go hand in hand withfunctional words, but in most cases, functional words flanking on one side, before or after, rather than on both sides. And the one-sided functional-word frames for nouns and verbs are different.3) In theinput, the number of syllables for nouns and verbs are different–nouns are usually disyllabic and verbsare usually monosyllabic.Based on the distributional patterns of nouns and verbs in the input mentioned above, sixexperiments were designed. With visual fixation procedure,12-14months old and18-22months oldinfants (173infants in total,64.7%) were tested with their categorization of noun and verb. The purposeof the study was to investigate whether children will rely on functional-worded frames around nounsand verbs to tag lexical items appropriately. The target words chosen were words which were unknownfor3years old children, like yan2jiu1(research/to research) and sheng3(province/to save up). Thefrequent function words were chosen from parents' input.Experiment1&2: whether Chinese infants can categorize nouns and verbs based on prepositivefunction words.12-14months olds and18-22months olds were tested. There are6targetwords:"yan2jiu1(research), jian3yan4(check), fa1ming2(invent), dian4cha2(investigate), tong3ji4(statistics), bian4lun4(debate)"; and4presositive function words:"wo3de…(my…), zhe4ge…(this…),wo3ye3…(I…also), ni3bie2…(you don't…)".Experiment3:15months old non-Chinese infants were tested. Exp3was tested in language lab,University of Quebec, Canada. The stimuli and design were the same as Exp2.Experiment4&5: whether Chinese infants can cagegorize nouns and verbs based on the frames.18-22months olds and12-14months olds were tested. There are two target words:"tun2(a type offarming village; to stock up) and sheng3(province; to save up)". And6frames, including3nounframes:"zai4…shang4(at…on), ge…shi (classifier…be) and de…dou (particle…all)";3verb frames:"jiu…le (just…aspect marker), mei…guo (not…aspect marker) and hai…zhe (still…aspect marker)."Experiment6: when Chinese infants cagegorize nouns and verbs based on the frames, whetherfamiliar words will count on.18-22months olds were tested. There are two target words same as Exp4:"tun2(a type of farming village; to stock up) and sheng3(province; to save up)". And6frames sameas Exp4, including3noun frames:"zai4…shang4(at…on), ge…shi (classifier…be) and de…dou(particle…all)";3verb frames:"jiu…le (just…aspect marker), mei…guo (not…aspect marker) andhai…zhe (still…aspect marker)."The experiments were devided into two kinds: one just has the front distributional cues, like"wo3de…(my…)" and "ni3bie2…(you don't…)"; the other has the frequent frames, like"zai4…shang4(at…on)" and "jiu4…le (just… aspect-marker)".The results showed that12-14months have part ability to cagegorize nouns and verbs only basedon the front distributional cues,18-22months can categorize nouns based on frames but not verbs.Two-sided frames help children to categorize nouns correctly.12-14month olds has part ability to categorize nouns and verbs. When getting older,18-22month olds have more strong ability. The results demonstrated children's ability develops with age. From14months old to18months old of age, children's ability enhances significantly. Their tagging abilitygrows with their general cognitive ability. With the enhancement of their cognitive ability, languageability and the enlargement of their lexicon, children's categorization ability for nouns and verbs isstrengthened.This thesis has significance for language acquisition theories, certificating that syntacticcategorization emerges at the earliest stage of language acquisition and is independent of learning themeaning of the word being categorized. This finding does not agree with the view of "SemanticBootstrapping theory", but supports the "Distributional Bootstrapping theory", and supports the viewthat early syntactic representations are abstract.
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