A Comparative Study Of Early Negation Acquisition In Chinese & English-speaking Children

Children's negation acquisition is an important aspect of children language acquisition. This thesis will, on the basis of a longitudinal study of two Chinese-speaking children and the available database of two English-speaking children, analyze early child negation acquisition from negative words, semantics and syntax, and categorize the inappropriate negative usages so that it can show the process and characteristics of child negation acquisition, aiming at exploring the similarities and differences between Chinese and English-speaking children as well as exploring the rooting causes.Firstly, it provides a detailed description on the negative acquisition of the two Chinese-speaking children MHR and ZHZ, consisting the background, study methodology, data collection and negation selecting standard. The study covers the two subjects from the age of 01;06;05 to 03;00;28, with each record lasting about an hour. It mainly focuses on the acquisition of negative words, their acquisition time, use frequency, six semantic negative categorizes and syntactic negative categories. Also it categorizes the inappropriate negation uses and the causes. Then it has the analysis about two subjects Adam and Sarah, from Brown database, from the same aspects as the above two Chinese-speaking children.Comparative study results shows that the sequence of the acquisition of negative words of Chinese-speaking children is bu4, mei2(mei2you3), bie2, for English-speaking children, the biggest difference between Adam and Sarah is the acquisition time of"not". According to common sense, Sarah acquired the negative words in an abnormal way. To Chinese-speaking children, the types of rejection denial and negative volition are acquired first, the type of prohibition, nonexistence and inability are not acquired at the same sequence, which is different from the study of Lee(1982) and Choi (1988), and not fully consistent with the study of Bloom(1970) and Vaidyanathan (1991). From the English data, Adam acquired negation later than Sarah. From semantics, Sarah developed as following: inability, rejection, nonexistence, negative volition, while it is hard to judge the developing sequence of Adam. For Chinese-speaking children, they use the type A (subject)+bu4+predict the most, next are type G (subject)+mei2(mei2yuo3)+predict and H (subject)+mei2(mei2yuo3), to English-speaking children, type A (subject)+no is the mostly frequently used, next is type E (subject)+ (auxiliary verb / BE) NOT + predicate. The time of each syntactic negative type is a little later than what Zhou Guoguang claimed(2002). About the frequency of inappropriate negation uses, English-speaking children are higher than Chinese-speaking children, among the inappropriate uses, MHR obviously overuses bu4, while ZHZ overuses mei2you3. On the above mentioned inappropriate uses and the similarities and differences between Chinese and English-speaking children, under the guidance of System Integration Theory, the causes will be explored from data differences, language complexity, acquisition device, input differences and frequency as well as cognition.