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Title: | Content-form interaction in the acquisition of temporal markers by mandarin-speaking children | Authors: | Tang, TPY Hsu, YY Lau, DKY Leung, MT |
Issue Date: | Jan-2024 | Source: | SAGE open, Jan.-Mar. 2024, v. 14, no. 1, https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241234215 | Abstract: | 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. | Keywords: | Acquisition Content Form Mandarin-speaking children Temporal markers Time concepts |
Publisher: | Sage Publications, Inc. | Journal: | SAGE open | EISSN: | 2158-2440 | DOI: | 10.1177/21582440241234215 | Rights: | © The Author(s) 2024 Creative Commons CC BY: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). The following publication Tang, T. P.-Y., Hsu, Y.-Y., Lau, D. K.-Y., & Leung, M.-T. (2024). Content-Form Interaction in the Acquisition of Temporal Markers by Mandarin-Speaking Children. Sage Open, 14(1) is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241234215. |
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Tang_Content-Form_Interaction_Acquisition.pdf | 1.64 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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