Tense and temporality

This study investigated the development of temporal adverbs in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of temporal adverbs indicating the past, present, and future were extracted from the Early Child Mandarin Corpus (168 children in four age groups: 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, 5;6). Data analyses indicated: (1) Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 21 types of temporal adverbs, and the children in the first age group (M = 2;6) were capable of using temporal adverbs to denote past, present, and future events; (2) within each age group, the children produced significantly more future temporal adverbs than the other two subtypes; and (3) there was a significant age effect that, with increased age, more children were able to produce all subtypes of temporal adverbs. Overall, findings of this corpus-based investigation shed light upon Chinese children's early-attained ability to express the three fundamental notions of time by resorting to the appropriate linguistic devices.

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Content-Form Interaction in the Acquisition of Temporal Markers by Mandarin-Speaking Children

Tang,

Hsu,

Lau

et al. 2024

SAGE Open

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Aspect markers (AMs), temporal adverbs (TAs) and temporal nouns (TNs) are used by young Mandarin-speaking children to express time. However, the factors that affect the relative acquisition trajectories of these categories remains unclear. Accordingly, this study adopts Weist’s time-concept model to examine the patterns of acquisition between and within the above three categories of temporal markers in the Mandarin system of time. Specifically, temporal markers were extracted from language samples obtained from 82 Mandarin-speaking children aged 2 to 5 years, who were divided into three groups by age. The results indicated that the token counts and the type counts of temporal markers were significantly higher among the older children, who were also more capable of using more categories of temporal markers, and were more likely to use multiple markers in single utterances. Of the three categories of temporal marker, AMs emerged earliest, and the participants’ repertoires of AMs stopped expanding sooner than their TA and TN repertoires did. As measured by token use, AMs were mastered earliest. Within each of the three categories, the acquisition of temporal-marker subgroups also varied according to two semantic features: temporal remoteness and specificity. The findings were consistent with Weist’s principles, and suggest that language-general time concepts (content) and language-specific syntactic properties (form) interact to shape the acquisition of temporal markers by Mandarin-speaking children, with the additional role being played by the semantic features of temporal remoteness and specificity within each category. Theoretical and clinical implications are also discussed.

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Tense and temporality

Cited by 7 publications

References 21 publications

Examining Phenotypical Heterogeneity in Language Abilities in Chinese-Speaking Children with Autism: A Naturalistic Sampling Approach

Examining Phenotypical Heterogeneity in Language Abilities in Chinese-Speaking Children with Autism: A Naturalistic Sampling Approach

Chinese preschoolers’ acquisition of temporal adverbs indicating past, present, and future: a corpus-based study

Content-Form Interaction in the Acquisition of Temporal Markers by Mandarin-Speaking Children

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