Predicting the development of interrogative forms and functions in early years: a corpus-based study of Mandarin-speaking young children

Abstract

This study examined the development of and possible predictors of interrogative forms and functions in early childhood Mandarin. All the interrogatives drawn from the Early Child Mandarin Corpus (168 children 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6) were analyzed. The main results indicated that (i) there were significant age effects in interrogative forms and functions, with the periods between the ages of 3;6 and 4;6 and between the ages of 2;6 and 3;6 being critical in the early acquisition of interrogative forms and functions, respectively; (ii) the form-function preference was verified, with wh-questions being primarily used to seek information (RfI), and intonation/echo and rhetorical questions being used to request action (RfA); (iii) more than half (59·5%) of the Mandarin interrogatives were used for RfI, whereas only 38·9% of them were used for RfA; and (iv) age, TV viewing time, and parent-child conversation time were the significant predictors of interrogative development.

Exposure to Language in Video and its Impact on Linguistic Development in Children Aged 3-11: A Scoping Review

“…Six observational studies (19.4%) used measures relating to syntactic or morphological knowledge. In four cases this involved collecting samples of children's spoken language and analysing them for syntactic complexity (Selnow, 1978;Selnow & Bettinghaus, 1982) or diversity/number of particular syntactic categories such as path verbs or interrogatives (Wu et al, 2022;Li et al, 2017). The only other syntactic measure used was a Sentence Repetition Test in which children are asked to repeat sentences of increasing grammatical complexity (Oryadi-Zanjani et al, 2021).…”

“…Bosma & Blom (2020) measured morphological development (the only study to do so) using a test in which children had to produce plural and past participle forms of test items. Of the studies that measured overall video exposure, one reported a positive effect of viewing on the number of interrogative forms used (Li et al, 2017), one reported a negative association between viewing and a sentence repetition test (Oryadi-Zanjani,et al, 2021), and four report null associations with syntactic or morphological measures (syntactic complexity : Selnow, 1978;Selnow & Bettinghaus, 1982; diversity of path verb types: Wu et al, 2022;morphology: Bosma & Blom, 2020). Both Selnow (1978) and Selnow and Bettinhaus (1982) also broke down viewing time into five genre categories and reported non-significant associations between viewing and syntax for all categories (note that this excludes cartoon viewing time in Selnow and Bettinghaus (1982) where a significant association is reported, but this is inconsistently presented as positive and negative in the text).…”