Do Mandarin-speaking Children Acquire Personal Pronouns Earlier And Better Than English-speaking Children?

The semantic interpretation of personal pronouns, which is generally and relatively, depends greatly on the roles (speaker, listener or onlooker) involved in the conversation in the specific language context. For understanding and producing personal pronouns correctly, by adequate linguistic and cognitive computing competence children adjust and change the role of the reference to accordance with the discourse. There is a great significance in exploring Mandarin and English speaking children's personal pronoun acquisition. Personal pronouns in English are much complicated than Mandarin's while linguistic complexity can affect the development process and acquiring order so that it seems that Mandarin-speaking children would acquire personal pronouns earlier and better than English-speaking children. The aim of the thesis is to verify this assumption. Longitudinal observing and statistical methods are employed to explore personal pronoun acquisition of Mandarin and English speaking children. Theories such as linguisitic complexity, universal language and cognitive developmental competence are adopted to explain and analyze reasons causing that conclusion.At first, a longitudinal research is conducted for personal pronoun acquisition of two Mandarin-speaking children and two English-speaking children. The conclusion is made that there is little significant difference in initial acquisition time of personal pronouns between Mandarin and English speaking children. What's more, the initial acquisition time of personal pronouns for both Mandarin and English speaking subjects is closed. The acquiring order of personal pronouns for the four subjects is as first, second and third personal pronouns. Singular personal pronouns are acquired prior to plural ones. In terms of personal pronoun frequency, English-speaking subjects produced more than Mandarin-speaking ones.A cross-sectional study is taken for the sake of examining the accuracy of the longitudinal study and results prove that no significant difference exist in comparison of types of personal pronouns between Mandarin and English speaking children in two-year-two-month group but as for the comparison of total frequency of personal pronouns, Mandarin-speaking subjects produce more than English-speaking subjects in this group. In the comparison of three-year group, it is no significant difference in types of acquiring personal pronouns. However, English-speaking subjects produce more personal pronouns than Mandarin-speaking subjects comparing total frequency. Based on above researches, the final conclusion is that simplicity of personal pronoun in Mandarin does not accelerate Mandarin-speaking children's personal pronoun acquisition and during acquiring process, Mandarin-speaking subjects don't produce more personal pronouns in their spontaneous production. Therefore, it is not reasonably and correctly to confirm that Mandarin-speaking children perform better in personal pronoun acquisition than English-speaking children.