L1 Acquisition of ‘Lao’ in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Authors: Pei-Yu Monica Hsu, 徐佩瑜
• Other Authors: Chun-Yin Doris Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/jybw75

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 101 === The present study focuses on the specific figurative expression lao which can be interpreted both literally and non-literally in Chinese. It aims to investigate Chinese-speaking children’s understanding of lao by examining five factors: the difficulty of metaphoricality, the degree of transparency, animacy effect, task effect, and age effect. Two comprehension tasks (i.e., interpretation and multiple-choice) were conducted and both of them were presented in a designed story scenario. The subjects were one hundred children in the elementary school in Taiwan, and they were further divided into five groups according to their ages (i.e., 7 year-olds to 11-year-olds). Also, twenty adults were recruited as the control group. The results showed that the literal meaning of lao was found easier to comprehend than the non-literal meaning of lao. With regard to the degree of transparency in the non-literal meanings of lao, the opaque non-literal meaning was found to be challenging for all the children. Concerning the task effects, no matter which type of meanings of lao, the subjects performed significantly better on the Multiple-choice task than on the Interpretation task. Finally, the results indicates that children at age 7 could only comprehend the literal meaning of lao, but those 8 to 9-year-olds could comprehend the non-literal meanings of lao and lao with inanimate NPs in particular, although their performances were still not adult-like. Our 10 to 11-year-old subjects were found to be able to comprehend the non-literal meanings of lao with both animate and inanimate NPs.