Word-learning strategies and mean length of utterances in Mandarin-English bilingual children

• Main Authors: Li-Chin Hsieh, 謝莉卿
• Other Authors: Kuo-You Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/70577804085839889263

碩士 === 朝陽科技大學 === 幼兒保育系碩士班 === 93 === In this study, we set three experiments on detecting Mandarin-English bilingual children and monolingual children’s use of word-learning strategies and mean length of utterances. In these experiments, we use 4-year-old and 6-year-old Mandarin-English bilingual and Mandarin monolinguals children to discuss these experiments. In the first experiment, we focus on the mutual exclusivity constraint across children’s word-learning and compare the different performance between two groups of children. We found that both monolinguals and bilingual children would choose the referent objects correctly when different language inputs and 6-year-old children tendency stronger to use the mutual exclusivity constraint than 4-year-old children. In the second experiment, we add social context in a sentence to investigate whether influence inference of the word-meaning in monolinguals and bilingual or not. We found that both monolinguals and bilingual children would choose the referent objects correctly when they encountered stronger referential intention. These results show that Mandarin-English bilingual and Mandarin monolinguals children would adopt both the mutual exclusivity constraint and social-pragmatic cues to interpret the meanings of new words. In the final experiment, we show picture to children and to detecting children’s mean length of utterances. Results indicate that performance of speech productivity in 6-year-old children are better then 4-year-old and 4-year-old Mandarin-English bilingual children’s MLU are better than 4-year-old Mandarin children’s, but 6-year-old Mandarin children’s MLU are better than 6-year-old Mandarin-English bilingual children''s.