An Empirical Study of Chinese-Speaking Preschoolers' Use of Connective Devices in Their L1 Narratives

• Main Authors: Chang-Wei Patrick Chen, 陳昌偉
• Other Authors: Chun-Yin Doris Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/66299405606043003344

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 94 === The present study aims to investigate the factors of age, the syntactic/semantic conjunctions, and methodological effects in Chinese-speaking preschoolers’ acquisition of conjunctions. Forty-five Chinese-speaking preschoolers participated in the experiment, and they were further categorized into three groups according to the age: Group 1 (3-year-old), Group 2 (4-year-old), and Group 3 (5-year-old). The experiment consisted of two tasks, one comprehension task (i.e., the Picture Identification Task), and one production task (i.e., the Story Retelling Task). The results of the comprehension task showed that five-year-olds outperformed three-year-olds and four-year-olds. One-way ANOVA indicated the there were significant differences in subordinator, additive, causal, and temporal conjunctions (p< 0.05). On the other hand, five-year-olds tended to use more conjunctions than the other two age groups in the production task; however, Chi-square analysis further indicated the difference among three age groups was not significant (p> 0.05). Therefore, “age” was proved to have an impact on the L1 preschoolers’ performance (i.e., the older the subjects were, the better comprehension and performance they had). In addition, it was found that in the PI task, causal conjunctions appeared to be the easiest one and adversative conjunctions were the most difficult while in the SR task, additive conjunctions were frequently used by the subjects. Finally, the results reflected in comprehension and production tasks were similar.