Analysis Of Syntactic Categories In The Input Before Emergence Of First Word In Chinese Language Acquisition

Chinese is a language with impoverished morphology. Identification of syntactic categories depends primarily on syntactic distribution of words. The distribution of words thus plays an important role in the acquisition of syntactic categories by Mandarin-speaking children. The present study has investigated the possibility that distributional information found in parental speech directed to Mandarin-speaking children before emergence of first word can provide reliable syntactic category information for language acquisition. The distribution of words given in terms of frequent frames is studied to evaluate the effect of the distributional information on the Mandarin-speaking children's syntactic category acquisition. Here, a frame is defined as a sequence of two jointly occurring words separated by an intervening word.In the distributional analysis based on some frequent frames from the parental input, the main finding is that frequent frames are an accurate and efficient source of information for categorizing words. Firstly, the distributional information of categories provided by frequent frames is robust, since the syntactic category information of words that constituted about two-thirds of each corpus was provided by the frequent frames that took up less than 3% of each corpus. Next, frequent frames in the parental speech can provide reliable syntactic category information, as provided by high accuracy scores and prominence scores. Thirdly, in my transcription, I adopt the distributional bootstrapping method for analyzing parental input and the main finding is that frequent frames are an accurate and efficient source of information for categorizing words, the distributional properties of both lexical categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives and functional categories like adverbs and sentence-final particles picked out by frequent frames.In sum, the distributional bootstrapping approach turns out to be a feasible mechanism for child acquiring distribution of Chinese syntactic categories. In the context of our discussion, children by two years of age have formed syntactic categories that reflect the distributional properties of these categories in the adult language.