A Comparative Study On English And Chinese-speaking Children's Early Acquisition Of Adverbs

Child language development has long been a hot issue and researchers have been fascinated by the seemingly effortless miracle of child language acquisition. Innumerable articles, books, journals and conferences have dealt with this topic from multidisciplinary perspectivesIn the research of child language development, lexicon attracts most attention in that lexicon is the foundation of language and early lexical development directly reflects how children construct meaning in their mental world. The Adverb is an important part of speech in modern Chinese. It is usually divided into many subcategories and different linguists have different way of classifications. The adverb comes very late in the process of child language development, and due to the limitation of the present research conditions, the research on it is easily overlooked.With the employment of classification method, exemplification method, longitudinal observation method and statistical method, the present paper examines the types, number and frequencies of three Chinese-speaking children named ZHZ, MHR and DQM based on the longitudinal data, and a comparative cross-sectional study is conducted with three English-speaking children named Seth, She and Lew from the English Peters Corpus and the English Post Corpus. The major findings are as follows:Firstly, the major type of adverbs acquired by Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children is negative adverbs, adverbs of repetition, and adverbs of degree. "Bu" occupies the highest proportion in negative adverbs; "hai" maintains highest ratio in adverbs of repetition, and the sequence of acquisition of adverbs of repetition is "hai", "ye", "you". Among adverbs of degree, "hao" is most frequently used.Secondly, adverbs of place and negative adverbs occupy the highest proportion in English-speaking children. Moreover, the characteristics of two-word utterances occur, such as "adverb+n." construction, "no+noun" construction and the omission of copula, etc.Thirdly, the cross-sectional study shows that the total number and total types of adverbs acquired by English and Chinese speaking children are almost the same. This shows that the cognitive development of children speaking different languages in similar age groups is more or less the same. Negative adverbs are most frequently used by Chinese-speaking children. English-speaking children named Seth and She use adverbs of place most frequently, and negative adverbs come in the second place. Lew's data show the individual variation to a certain extent. Lew uses negative adverbs most frequently while adverbs of place are in second. The results indicate that those are due to different adverb classification method of two different languages and syntactic difference.