Purpose: The current investigation evaluated the extent to which early noun, verb, and adjective lexicon sizes predicted later grammatical outcomes in Mandarin-speaking children with and without late language emergence (LLE) using a parent report. Method: In Study 1, the parents of 24 Mandarin-speaking children with typical language filled out the…

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin-speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3- and 5-year-old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers' speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book…

Previous research indicates that infant-directed speech (IDS) is usually slower than adult-directed speech (ADS) and mothers prefer placing a focused word in isolation or utterance-final position in (English) IDS, which may benefit word learning. This study investigated the speaking rate and word position of IDS in two typologically-distinct…

The present studies sought to investigate the mapping relations between language and cognition by focusing on how Mandarin-speaking children acquire the mapping between their conceptual knowledge of possession and their linguistic expressions of possession. Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 used a comprehension task to explore whether…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Mandarin classifiers are a complex system, but little is known about how Mandarin-speaking children manage to learn the system. Based on the extant literature, we explored potential factors influencing the comprehension and production of Mandarin shape classifiers, including classifier-based semantic categorization and errors pertaining to the…

The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word's form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ("a"/"an"/"the"), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in…

This study investigates the developmental trajectory of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin-learning children's speech. We analyze the spontaneous production of RCs by four monolingual Mandarin-learning children (0;11 to 3;5) and their input from a longitudinal naturalistic speech corpus (Min, 1994). The results reveal that in terms of the…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…

Most evidence concerning cross-linguistic variation in noun bias, the preponderance of nouns in early expressive lexicons (Gentner, 1982), has come from comparisons of monolingual children acquiring different languages. Such designs are susceptible to a number of potential confounders, including group differences in developmental level and…

This paper explores whether English-Mandarin bilingual children have mastered discourse skills and whether they show sensitivity to the discourse principle of information status of referents in their speech and gestures. We compare the speech and gestures produced by bilingual children to those produced by English- and Mandarin-speaking…