Corpus-based Analysis On Sentence Patterns Of Child Directed Speech Input

Child-directed speech (CDS in short hereinafter) input, one of the most crucial parts of the environmental influence on language acquisition, is of prime significance in the studies of first language acquisition in order to understand what makes children so good at acquiring languages and how to make use of the input to account for children's acquisition of linguistic categories. This input is considerably different from the rapid, casual speech that adults usually hear, and almost all adults, from various cultures, speaking various languages, whatever their sexes or ages, have been found to modify their way of speaking when talking to young children, and adults adapt various features of their language to the developmental level of their children. Systematic investigations of the nature of CDS input have indicated that CDS input is characterized by melodic pitch, higher pitch, increased pitch range, repetitive questioning, slower or deliberate tempo, simplified vocabulary, less variety of semantic categories, fewer verb forms and modifiers, shorter and less complex syntactic structure, highly well-formed with few examples of disfluency of garbled speech, fewer subordinate clauses or embeddings per utterance, etc.In the present study, the author chooses to analyze English-speaking and Mandarin Chinese-speaking CDS input corpuses from the perspective of sentence patterns, which are categorized from three different angles: 1) fragments, simple sentences, compound sentences and complex sentences among all sentences in each CDS input corpus; 2) declarative sentences, interrogative sentences, imperative sentences and exclamatory sentences among all simple sentences in each CDS input corpus; 3) yes/no questions, wh-questions, tag-questions and alternative questions among all interrogative sentences in each CDS input corpus.The analysis of these corpuses from the above aspects demonstrates that simple sentences play an absolutely predominant role in all English-speaking and Mandarin Chinese-speaking corpuses; and declarative sentences and interrogative sentences in total amount to more than two thirds among all simple sentences in each group of English-speaking and Mandarin Chinese-speaking corpuses on average; and yes/no questions take a definitely dominant position in both English-speaking and Mandarin Chinese-speaking corpuses. Despite the commonalities between English-speaking and Mandarin Chinese-speaking CDS input, compound sentences in English- speaking corpuses have been found to account for a relatively larger proportion than those in Mandarin Chinese-speaking corpuses.Results and general discussions illustrated in the present study will contribute to understanding better the nature of CDS input, most of all, the syntactic nature of CDS input in the earliest period of children's language development. In addition, similarities and differences found among English and Mandarin Chinese corpuses can be further adapted to language education to Chinese-speaking children or English-speaking children.