On English And Chinese-speaking Children's Early Acquisition Of Nouns

This descriptive research mainly studies the early noun acquisition of English and Chinese-speaking children. It analyzes the data collected from longitudinal research and Brown Corpus by classifying nouns into five categories. Through the researches on the types, order and use frequency of early nouns acquired by Chinese-speaking children, we try to find out some laws and characteristics of children's early noun acquisition. In order to find out the similarities and differences of early noun acquisition between English and Chinese-speaking, a cross-linguistic research is carried out. What's more, the reasons of those similarities and differences are analyzed accordingly.Chapter 1 contains an overview of the previous research situation at home and abroad and the classification of nouns. Based on Zhu Dexi's sorting, we classify nouns into five categories: individual nouns, material nouns, collective nouns, abstract nouns and proper nouns. This classification is adopted to analyze the early nouns acquired by children in the following chapters.Chapter 2 gives a detailed description of Chinese-speaking children's early noun acquisition. Criteria for an acquired noun, methods of data collection and selection are introduced in this chapter. The investigation on children's early nouns of five categories is made from the aspects of the emerging time, quantity and frequency. And we find both individual differences and similarities in early noun acquisition of the three subjects. The differences lie in the emerging time of their first nouns, the quantities of each child's nouns at the same age. The similarities involve the similar acquisition order and use frequency, that is, individual nouns are acquired firstly and the most commonly used, proper nouns are next to individual nouns, while collective nouns and abstract nouns are acquired the latest and seldom used. The results could be demonstrated from the aspects of cognitive development, language input and individual interests.Chapter 3 involves two studies: one is a study on English-speaking children's early noun acquisition; the other is a cross-linguistic study. The former one studies three English-speaking toddlers'early noun acquisition, the data of which are obtained from Brown Corpus. It aims to find out whether the acquisition tendency of Chinese-speaking children is also the case of English-speaking children. The result shows that the acquisition pattern of early nouns of English-speaking children bears a strong resemblance to Chinese-speaking children. That is, the number of the acquired individual nouns is the largest, proper nouns the second, material nouns the third, collective nouns and abstract nouns the smallest. This result is a good support to language universals. The latter study selects some data of three Chinese-speaking children and one English-speaking child aged from 01;06;00 to 01;09;06 to see if there are some differences in their early noun acquisition. Through this research we find that the English-speaking subject learns more nouns than the three Chinese-speaking subjects at the same age. The reasons involve cognitive development, environment and different language structures of English and Chinese.Through the studies on English and Chinese-speaking children'early noun acquisition we find that there are few theories which can explain all the phenomena of noun acquisition well. That is because noun acquisition is influenced by many factors, such as cognitive development, language input, language structure and individual interest and so on. Therefore, the research on noun acquisition should take various factors into account to find out better ways for children to acquire nouns.