Chinese Bilingual Children''s Word Learning Strategies

• Main Authors: Shu-Chen Peng, 彭淑貞
• Other Authors: Hintat Cheung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/39730357575423044211

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 語言學研究所 === 87 === The mutual exclusivity constraint, which is suggested to be one of the most often used strategies when children learn new words, refers to the finding that children often avoid two labels for the same object (Markman, 1994). This constraint is generally considered to have four effects-disambiguation, correction, rejection, and restriction effects (Merriman & Bowman, 1989). Davidson et al. (1997) further showed that the mutual exclusivity constraint would be affected by bilingualism; that is, bilingual children did not use the constraint as extensively as that of monolingual children. Pursuing this line of inquiry, the present study focused on Mandarin-Taiwanese bilingual children''s use of the mutual exclusivity constraint. Following Davidson et al. (1997), the present study comprised three tests; namely, the disambiguation test, the rejection test, and the restriction test, to examine whether bilingualism would affect children''s use of the mutual exclusivity constraints. Furthermore, these tests were accessed in three different input conditions, to examine these children''s sensitivities to different language inputs. These different input conditions included: (1) All-Mandarin: Throughout the test, only Mandarin was used, including the target artificial words; (2) Mixed-code: Throughout the test, only Mandarin was used, except that the target artificial names resemble to Taiwanese words in terms of phonological shapes; (3) All-Taiwanese: Throughout the test, only Taiwanese was used, including the target artificial words. 38 monolingual Mandarin-speaking and 58 Mandarin-Taiwanese bilingual children participated in the three tests, including younger (4-year-old) and older (6-year-old) ones. The results indicated that the influence of bilingualism was only significantly different in the restriction test. Bilingual children tended to suspend the use of the mutual exclusivity constraint more often than monolingual ones did. Besides, our results indicated that children''s sensitivities to different languages were influenced by bilingualism. In the disambiguation test and the restriction test, children of the bilingual group were more sensitive to different language inputs than monolingual children were. However, our results supported that neither children''s applications of the mutual exclusivity constraint nor their sensitivity to different language inputs were influenced by their developmental pattern, except that in the disambiguation test, only younger children of the monolingual group were sensitive to different language inputs, while older ones were not. Taken together, the findings of the present study suggested that young bilinguals in Taiwan are sensitive to the type of language they are spoken to and would invoke different learning strategies accordingly.