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Early vocabulary development in Mandarin (Putonghua) and Cantonese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2009

TWILA TARDIF ,
PAUL FLETCHER ,
WEILAN LIANG  and
NIKO KACIROTI
TWILA TARDIF*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
PAUL FLETCHER
Affiliation:
University College Cork
WEILAN LIANG
Affiliation:
Peking University First Hospital
NIKO KACIROTI
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
Address for correspondence: Twila Tardif, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043. e-mail: twila@umich.edu
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Abstract

Parent report instruments adapted from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) examined vocabulary development in children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6 for two Chinese languages, Mandarin (n=1694) and Cantonese (n=1625). Parental reports suggested higher overall scores for Mandarin- than for Cantonese-speaking children from approximately 1 ; 4 onward. Factors relevant to the difference were only-child status, monolingual households and caregiver education. In addition to the comparison of vocabulary scores overall, the development of noun classifiers, grammatical function words common to the two languages, was assessed both in terms of the age and the vocabulary size at which these terms are acquired. Whereas age-based developmental trajectories again showed an advantage for Beijing children, Hong Kong children used classifiers when they had smaller vocabularies, reflecting the higher frequencies and greater precision of classifier use in adult Cantonese. The data speak to the importance of using not just age, but also vocabulary size, as a metric by which the acquisition of particular linguistic elements can be examined across languages.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2009 , pp. 1115 - 1144
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

This research would not have been possible without the assistance of more than 3,000 families and over 50 research assistants. We acknowledge funding for the project from a Hong Kong government Earmarked grant for research (#HKU 7158/99H) to Dr Paul Fletcher and NSF grant # BCS-0350272 to Dr Twila Tardif. In addition, we thank Tracy Chan, Kawai Leung, Shirley Leung and Sam Leung in Hong Kong and Bo Hao, Qicheng Jing, Zhixiang Zhang and Qihua Zuo in Beijing for their unfailing commitment and support at various stages of this project.

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