A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese-speaking Children's Conversational Cohesion

In children's conversation discourses, cohesion is an important way to keep the topic. Children's replacement of cohesive devices shows up their real level for language understanding. Therefore, this paper makes researches on children's conversation discourses in early childhood, finding out the various factors that affect children's language development, grasping and controlling them, which can better promote children's language acquisition. This topic puts Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory as the theoretical basis, from the perspective of discourse, the paper makes a comparative analysis research for the overt cohesion in English and Chinese children's conversation.Longitudinal observation and statistical method are employed to examine the situation on replacement of early children's cohesive devices. The study covers 48 observation sessions chosen from two Chinese-speaking subjects MHR aged from02;00; 10 to 05; 00; 10 and ZHZ aged from 02; 00; 00 to 04; 11; 26. According to the data, the author mainly focuses on the initial appearance time and types, tokens,replacement rules of children's conversational cohesive devices. Then an analysis is conducted about two English-speaking subjects ADA aged from02; 03; 04 to04;10;00and SAR from the age of 02; 03; 05 to 04; 11; 26 from the Brown Corpus,from the same aspects as the above two Chinese-speaking children. Finally, a cross-sectional study is conducted for the purpose of discussing the similarities and differences between English and Chinese-speaking children's replacement of conversational cohesive devices.The major results are:(1)For grammatical cohesive devices, Mandarin-speaking children's using numbers overall in verbal substitution and adversirative relation grow slowly with their age growing, while English-speaking children's keeps stable,without obvious changes.(2)For lexical cohesive devices, the developing tendency of the children speaking Chinese or English is that the using numbers of repetitionreduces with their age growing.(3)In Question-Answer mode, the using frequencies of Mandarin-speaking children's conjunction deduce along with the time going, while that of English-speaking children's goes up slowly.(4)In Question-Answer mode, the using frequency of the children speaking Chinese or English in repetition and general reference grows with their growing.Children's replacement and adjustment of conversational cohesive devices is related to children's speech center, intelligence, thinking development, the differences of language input and cultural Environment.