Measuring Early Vocabulary Growth in Mandarin-Speaking Children: A Corpus-Based Study
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Yang, Jing-Chen
Abstract
This study aims to measure early vocabulary growth in Mandarin-speaking children from Taiwan with a corpus-based method. Children’s vocabulary growth was examined in aspects of vocabulary growth and vocabulary organization. Vocabulary growth was measured by computing vocabulary size, frequency and proportion of parts-of-speech, noun-verb ratio, type-token ratio, and D measure. Vocabulary organization was measured by computing the number of nouns in semantic categories and conceptual levels. Results of the measures showed a developmental trend with increasing ages. Vocabulary size increases with age. Frequency and proportion of lexical categories suggest that nouns and verbs were acquired before other word classes. The proportion of nouns and verbs decreases with increasing age, while that of other lexical categories increases. Type-token ratio implies that children acquired more nouns and verbs and also used them very often in all stages. The declining TTR of classifiers and modals indicate that they were used more frequently in later stages. Noun-verb ratio reveals that a weak noun bias was found in 19-24 months, and a verb bias was found in later stages. D values suggest that children’s lexicon became increasingly diverse. Analysis of semantic categories reveals that the most concrete nouns and nouns which were the closest to children’s life were acquired earlier, such as people, tools, animals, and food, and vehicles. Nouns in these categories were also used frequently. Nouns which were abstract and far away from children’s life were acquired later and used with a lower frequency, such as numerals, shapes, colors, and nouns of natural phenomena. Analysis of conceptual levels has shown that basic-level words were acquired first, followed by subordinate words and superordinate words. The timing of acquiring superordinate level and subordinate level words varies in different semantic categories. Basic-level words were used with a higher frequency than the other two levels. All of the computations about vocabulary growth and vocabulary organization in this study have revealed general developmental trends of children’s early Mandarin vocabulary. Some of the measured items may become an index of measuring of vocabulary growth after further studies.
Subjects
vocabulary acquisition
noun bias
basic-level category
Mandarin acquisition
lexical diversity
corpus
Type
thesis
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