English And Chinese-speaking Children's Early Noun Acquisition From The Perspective Of Categorization

Categorization is a cognitive activity--mankind's most important and basic activity. Categorization is the theoretical basis in the whole cognitive linguistics and the core issue in it. Children in the cognitive process of things will classify them according to their understanding. In cognitive linguistics, prototype is the cognitive reference point of categorization, and all the concepts are based on the establishment of the prototype-centered.This thesis applies the theory of categorization to study the early noun acquisition of two English-speaking children and two Chinese-speaking children. It analyzes the data collected from longitudinal research and Brown Corpus by classifying nouns into nine categories. Through the researches on the use frequency and quantity of early nouns acquired by children and how children to categorize, we try to find out some laws and characteristics of children's early noun categorization acquisition. In order to find out the similarities and differences of early noun categorization 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.Besides the introduction and conclusion part, this thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter One is an overview of the previous studies at home and abroad, the classification of nouns and the theory of categorization. Based on Li Yuming's sorting method, we classify nouns into nine categories: kinship terms, names of organs, names of clothes, names of utensils, names of transports, names of foods, names of animals, names of natural objects, and names of colors. This thesis focuses on the prototype of kinship terms, organ nouns, clothes nouns and color nouns.Chapter Two is a case study of two Chinese-speaking children's early noun acquisition. The investigation on children's early nouns of nine categories is made from the aspects of tokens and frequency. And we find both individual differences and similarities in early noun categorization acquisition of the two subjects and the reasons are from cognitive development, language input, sexual differences, and individual interests and so on.Chapter Three involves the description of English-speaking children's early noun acquisition. The data are obtained from Brown Corpus. It aims to find out the acquisition tendency of English-speaking children. The result shows that English-speaking children acquired utensil nouns the most; English-speaking male child acquired transport nouns far more than English-speaking female child and so on. The reasons involve cognitive development and environment.Chapter Four carries out a cross-linguistic study of Chinese and English-speaking children's early noun acquisition. It aims to find out similarities and differences between Chinese-speaking male and female children, English-speaking male and female children. The result shows that Chinese-speaking female child learned animal nouns the most; male children acquired transport nouns far more than female children and so on. The development of categorization is connected with language input, sexual differences, individual interests, cognitive development, and language environment. In a word, the research on noun acquisition should take various factors into account to find out better ways for children to acquire mother tongue well and quickly.