The Development Of Category Level Words In Mandarin Speaking Children

There are many researches concerned with the developmental order of categories.Among these views, two are dominant: one view holds that children’s first categoriesare basic-level categories, followed by subordinate categories, and superordinatecategories acquired at last. The other holds that children’s early category developmentis from general to specific, which equals to the view that superordinate categories isthe first to enter children’s mental lexicon. These two views of children’s earlycategory level development due to their different research methods. Researchesholding that basic-level categories are acquired first usually selected subjects olderthan two years old, and these subjects’ production is their main focus, whileresearches considering superordinate categories develop first, using subjects youngerthan one year old, whose language capability haven’t fully developed, and theymainly focus on their subjects’ category comprehension. How to investigate thedevelopment of children’s categorization capability from production andcomprehension respectively, current researches are far from answering.In the field of language acquisition research on Mandarin speaking children, onlyJiang (2000) has provided a general picture of basic-level effects in Chinese lexicon.However, in her study, how basic-level vocabulary evolved before two years of agewas not studied. Furthermore, adult criteria were used to determine the basic-levellexicon of children, based on productivity and high frequency of word usage in corpusdata. This paper is committed to the development of Mandarin speaking children’searly lexicon, exploring their development of different category levels. There arethree major research questions:1) In the development of Mandarin speakingchildren’s language, which category level words will be dominant in comprehensionand production respectively?2) What is the developmental order of superordinate,basic-level, subordinate words in comprehension and production for Mandarinspeaking children?3) What is the correlation between children’s languagedevelopment and category development?This study used controlled experiments, longitudinal case data and Zhou’s corpusdata to explore the development of Mandarin speaking children’s early categories.Subjects involved in both the controlled experiment and supplementary experimentwere48children from three age groups, all groups were equal in number. Each groupcontained16children, aged3,4, and5respectively. The experimental materials were 48color pictures, with16pictures used in the pretest experiment,32pictures used inthe formal experiment. Both experiments included a pretest experiment, acomprehension test and a production test. The longitudinal case data was collectedfrom a Mandarin speaking child named YDZ, from his18months to24months, boththe audio and video data were collected every two weeks. Each session wastranscribed in handwritten Mandarin Chinese orthography, using the transcriptionconventions adopted at Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Zhou’scorpus mainly covered four age groups from Chinese Zhou1corpus, includingchildren aged from14months to32months, as well as seven age groups from ChineseZhou2corpus, including children aged from36months to72months, altogether110children were included. Nouns were extracted as the main research materials. Thelongitudinal case data adopted Miller’s (1990) classification, that is, all the nouns ineach session were divided into11categories. As to data from Zhou’s corpus, SPSSwas used for analysis, and multiple independent samples test (K Independent SamplesTest) was adopted for further data analysis.Experimental data and corpus data both showed that basic-level words weredominant in both comprehension and production of early language development byMandarin speaking children, and in both comprehension and production tests, thedevelopmental order was first basic level words, followed by subordinate andsuperordinate words. In addition, there is a correlation between the development ofcategorization ability and language development. The development of categorizationcapability facilitates children’s early language development.