| The present study was undertaken to examine some of the classic hypotheses regarding the effects of "input", or adult-to-child language, that have been developed from research into the acquisition of English and apply them to the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese, a language which has received very little attention in the acquisition literature. Thus, in addition to presenting correlational data on the relationships between the types of utterances, word frequencies, and positions of words in Mandarin-speaking caregivers' speech and their children's lexical and syntactic development, I also present basic descriptive information on the language use of the caregivers and children in my sample. Ten children (5 from "worker" families and 5 from "intellectual" families), aged 21-months at the beginning of my study, were recorded while interacting with their caregivers in their Beijing homes for one hour every two weeks throughout a 24-week study period. Results obtained from analyses of the caregivers' speech when the children were 22-months of age and from the children's speech at 26-months of age indicate that there are very general positive relationships between adult-to-child questions and children's early vocabulary development. However, no evidence was found for the effects of adult-to-child questions on children's development of the auxiliary verb system--one of the most robust effects of input on syntactic acquisition in the English language data. The most surprising result from these data is that 8 out of 10 of the Mandarin-speaking children in my sample were found to produce more verbs than nouns at both the 22-month and 26-month recordings, thus presenting a challenge to proposals for early word learning based on the assumption of a universal noun bias in children's early vocabularies. This tendency for Mandarin-speaking children to produce more verbs than nouns in their early vocabularies was also discussed in relation to the frequency and syntactic salience of verbs in Mandarin-speaking caregivers' language and contrasted with the salience of nouns in English, providing suggestive evidence for the role of input in determining cross-linguistic patterns of lexical acquisition. |
