Early Language Acquisition of Mandarin-Speaking Children

Compared with other subdisciplines in Chinese linguistics, children's language acquisition is a significant field with relatively limited achievements. Based on data from a dynamic and developmental corpus, this book is a comprehensive exploration of the early development of Chinese-speaking children's language acquisition. Anchoring the discussions regarding phonetics, semantics and aspects of syntax in a cognitive and functional framework, the author conducts an in-depth analysis of many acquisition characteristics, such as the inevitable and incidental errors of their learning of initials; their ability to obtain the concept of time at a young age and the utilization of Le in the expression of the past tense; their understanding of subjectivity at a young age and the ability to express it; their learning of the degree of modality following the order of from probability to necessity; and children's acquisition of syntactic structures being impacted by genetics and also affected by the steps involved in syntactic processing. Although genetics, cognition and experience all play a role in children's language acquisition, this book focuses on the role of cognitive functions. By successfully explaining the acquisition rules based on some cutting-edge linguistic theories, the book will certainly be beneficial to scholars studying linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and early childhood educators.

Yunqiu Zhang is a professor of linguistics and applied linguistics at the School of Arts of Capital Normal University. Her main research interest include children's language acquisition and research regarding cognitive grammar in Chinese.

List of figures. List of tables. Acknowledgements. 1 Introduction 2 A Phonetic Investigation of the Acquisition and Development of Primary Vowels 3 Deviation Phenomena in the Acquisition of Initials 4 Acoustic Analyses of Tone Acquisition and Related Errors 5 Acquisition of Locative Words Relating to "Up" and "Down" 6 The Onset of Time Consciousness - the Acquisition of Le - 7 Acquisition and Development of Expressions of Subjectivization 8 Early Acquisition of Degrees of Modality 9 Acquisition of the Zai -Construction 10 Early Acquisition and Development of the Ditransitive Construction 11 Acquisition of Simplex Relative Clauses References. Index