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Developmental changes in the early child lexicon in Mandarin Chinese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2014

MEILING HAO ,
YOUYI LIU ,
HUA SHU ,
AILING XING ,
YING JIANG  and
PING LI
MEILING HAO
Affiliation:
College of Advanced Chinese Training, Beijing Language and Culture University
YOUYI LIU
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal University
HUA SHU*
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal University
AILING XING
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal University
YING JIANG
Affiliation:
Beijing Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, Capital Medical University
PING LI*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University
*
Address for correspondence: Hua Shu, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. e-mail: shuh@bnu.edu.cn
Address for correspondence: Ping Li, Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. e-mail: pul8@psu.edu
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Abstract

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of words in Chinese-speaking children's earliest productive vocabulary; (ii) overall, Chinese-speaking children's vocabulary contains greater proportions of nouns than other word categories, especially at the earliest vocabulary stage; and (iii) verbs tend to appear earlier for Chinese-speaking children as compared with English-speaking children at the same levels of vocabulary development. In addition, our study has identified the underlying variables that influence the age of acquisition of words, specifically, the interplay between the conceptual (imageability) and linguistic properties (word frequency, word length, and grammatical category) that jointly shape the development of Mandarin-speaking children's early vocabulary.

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Articles
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Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , May 2015 , pp. 505 - 537
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

The research was supported by grants from the Natural Science Foundation of China (31271082, 30900392, 61373065), Major Project of National Social Science Foundation (11&ZD186), Key Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research, Ministry of Education (11JZD041) to HS and YL, from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1252475) to PL, from the Project of Beijing municipal philosophy and social science planning (13JYB014) to MH, from the Fund for Foreign Scholars in University Research and Teaching Programs (B07008) and the Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences Researcher Center under the Ministry of Education (08JJD740063) to PL and HS.

References

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