From First Words to Fluency in Mandarin

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This research project follows 300 Mandarin-speaking children in Beijing, China, who will be tested at yearly intervals from 8 months to 5-1/2 years of age. Our goals are to describe basic patterns of language development in Mandarin Chinese as well as to examine how different aspects of language development interact over time. Mandarin is the language of focus for this research not only because of the current under-availability of data on the language spoken by the world's largest population, but also because specific features of Mandarin phonology, vocabulary, and syntax differ enormously and in theoretically interesting ways from English. Several of these issues have been examined independently in small samples of children and results from these studies have already posed major challenges to existing theories of how children learn their native language. Replicating and extending these findings in a large, representative sample will allow for much stronger universal theories of language acquisition. The sample of children to be investigated in this study is unique and exemplary in child language acquisition in terms of its size, diversity across gender and socioeconomic groups, representativeness across different levels of linguistic abilities, and in the wealth of linguistic and background data sampled. At each wave of data collection, children's phonological, lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic development will be measured, allowing for the investigation of specific hypotheses with powerful statistical modeling techniques.