Linguistic Cues To Form Classes In Chinese Child-Directed Speech: A Role For Syntactic Bootstrapping

Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory that explains children’s verb acquisition. It refers to the phenomenon that children can exploit the neighboring information, such as part of speech or syntactic structure, to perceive, acquire or learn a novel verb, including the meaning and part of speech. There are many studies in English Child-directed speech(CDS) that have proved the feasibility of syntactic bootstrapping in English. However, the cross-language generality of this theory is still under question.The present study aims to test the universality of syntactic bootstrapping in Chinese child-directed speech. Specifically, this paper tries to find whether there are linguistic markers that help Chinese children acquire form classes of different novel words in their native language, especially for verbs. We expect that there is a correspondence between those target words(nouns and verbs) and linguistic makers that they are able to cue each other. To test this hypothesis, we performed corpus analysis on Chinese child-directed speech employing Beijing corpus on CHILDES.The present data analysis was finished according to the following procedure. On one hand, utterances containing 45 target verbs and 34 target nouns in Beijing corpus were extracted, sorted, calculated and analyzed to check their frequency of appearing with the 18 potential linguistic markers, as well as their syntactic environment. Those potential markers were selected initially according to their features in Mandarin Chinese’s daily usage and definition in the Chinese dictionary. Then we checked the corpus and made sure that they also had been acquired by 16-21 months old children. On the other hand, utterances involving those 18 linguistic markers were also analyzed to know how often they appear with those nouns or verbs.The corpus analyses found that 1) in Mandarin Chinese, potential linguistic markers tended to appear with their correspondent form classes.; 2) there was no difference between noun-and verb-markers’ predictive strength, but noun-markers appeared more with verbs than verb marker’s appeared with nouns; 3) verbs had a higher token frequency, higher marker frequency, and higher proportion of appearing with form classes markers; 4) sentence position did not relate with 16-21 month old children’s verb acquisition; 5) verb-markers did make a contribution in children’s verb learning.These findings suggests that there are potential linguistic markers in Chinese CDS that can be perceived and used by children to learn verbs, which can influence Chinese children’s language acquisition and provide support for syntactic bootstrapping in Chinese, thus making a further contribution in proving the universality of this theory.