The Effect Of Language Experience On The Development Of Children's Syntactic Awareness

The present study investigated the effect of language experience on children's syntactic awareness, to be exactly, the effect of dialects which have no written forms on children's Chinese syntactic awareness. Most people in the transitional region between Fuqing city and Putian city can speak both Putian dialect and Fuqing dialect other than Putonghua, therefore, we choosed 199 children as subjects from K2, K3, and Grade 1 to 3 in the primary school. Among them, there were 81 Putonghua monolinguals,59 Putonghua-Putian/Fuqing dialect bilinguals, and 59 Putonghua-Putian dialect-Fuqing dialect trilinguals. Grammatical judgement task and sentence correction task were conducted to explore children's syntactic awareness. The experimental data showed that children who can speak dialects performed worse than those who only can speak Putonghua, that is, dialects which had no written forms played a negative role on children's syntactic awareness development. However, bilinguals' syntactic awareness did not show significant difference from that of trilinguals, that is, children's syntactic awareness did not develop with language experience. Furthermore, the result showed that children's syntactic awareness developed with age and had a remarkable difference with sex for the fact that girls performed better than boys in both grammatical judgement task and sentence correction task.