| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 語言學研究所 === 89 === The aim of this study is to examine the word definition skills of three different groups of Chinese bilingual children. These three bilingual groups are: (1) Mandarin-English bilingual children in an immersion program (ME-I); (2) Mandarin-English bilingual children in a bilingual program (ME-B); (3) Mandarin-Taiwanese bilingual children in a monolingual program (MT-M). There are also three age levels: (1) middle class in the kindergarten (K2); (2) top class in the kindergarten (K3); and (3) first grade in the elementary school (G1). In addition to the Chinese word definition task, these children’s language proficiency in three languages (Mandarin, English, Taiwanese), comprehension of related superordinate terms and their flexibility in classifying various sorts of objects were also examined as controls. One of our major concerns is on the possible differences on the metalinguistic development of these three bilingual groups. Results from the word definition task indicated that Mandarin-English bilinguals of first graders who had once enrolled in an immersion program perform significantly better than their Mandarin-Taiwanese counterparts as well as the Mandarin-English bilinguals in the bilingual program. The differences between Mandarin-English bilinguals in immersion program and Mandarin-Taiwanese bilinguals in monolingual program would be caused by their different route in acquiring the second language while the differences between the two types of Mandarin-English bilinguals would be caused by their different amounts of input of the second language. In the two control tasks, the comprehension of the superordinate term and the object classification task, no differences were found among these three different groups. Besides, the possibility that the source of the significant growth in word definition might come from these children’s better language proficiency was also excluded by further examination. To conclude, only bilingual children who receive second language education at school with enough stimuli will show better metalinguistic skills.
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