The Acquisition Of Classifiers By Mandarin Speaking Children

A lot of issues about classifiers acquisition by mandarin-speaking children havebeen widely discussed in recent thirty years. These issues mainly focus on therelationship between classifiers acquisition and children’s cognitive development, thedifference between count classifiers and mass classifiers, the acquisition sequence ofall kinds of classifiers and the quantitative characteristics of classifiers. However, dueto the differences in the scope of investigated classifiers and experimental methods,there exist some differences in the acquisition problems, especially the acquisitionsequence.On the basis of analysis of Chinese classifiers in theoretical linguistics, thepresent study adopts the methods of naturalistic corpus analysis and picture-cued taskto explore Chinese children’s acquisition of classifiers. These experiments aredesigned to investigate the following issues: i). Chinese children’s use of classifiersdifference among various age groups, ii). emergency sequence of various kinds ofclassifiers, and iii). characteristics reflected in the acquisition of classifiers andinfluencing factors on the process of classifiers acquisition by children.In the first study, we analyse the corpus from the Child Language Data ExchangeSystem (CHILDES), which is collected by Professor Zhou Jing, a child psychologicallinguist of Nanjing Normal University. The study analyses the use of classifiers in140children’s naturalistic speech of seven age groups (age range from3;0to6;0), whichwould sketch a bird view of the process of classifier development.The second study is an elicitation production task. It adopts the picture-cuedmethodology to examine the competence of classifiers acquisition by56children inseven age groups, which is similar to the first study.(Every age group has8children.)These two studies allow us to make following conclusions. First, children’sacquisition of classifiers is strongly associated with their age. And the age from4;0to6;0is a crucial stage for our children’s rapid development in their acquisition ofclassifiers. Second, in terms of acquisition sequence, children perform better on countclassifiers than mass classifiers. Meanwhile, classifier ge, zhi are the earliest acquired ones. Container classifiers and group classifiers are also relatively earlier acquired. Bycontrast, partitive classifiers and temporary classifiers cause the subjects a lot ofdifficulties and are therefore the last acquired ones. Third, some characteristics arerepresented in the process of classifier acquisition: one is that the subjects useclassifier ge to classify objects regardless of different semantic meanings; the other isthat numeral phrase containing classifier in the children’s speech is simple, mainly forthe structure ’Numeral+CL+Noun’ or ’Numeral+CL’. Finally, individualdifferences among children, including active teaching at home, ability to count andconserve numbers and individual differences in language ability affect the acquisitionof classifiers to some degree.