| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 95 === ABSTRACT
The present study aims to explore Chinese children’s acquisition of the count and mass classifiers by conducting an experiment with two tasks, a comprehension task (i.e., the Picture Identification Task), and a production task (i.e., the Picture Description Task). The experiment was designed to investigate issues in the count-mass distinction, age effect, task effect, hierarchy of difficulty in children’s acquisition of classifiers, and their misuse of the classifier ge. Forty-five Chinese-speaking preschoolers participated in the experiment, and they were further divided into three groups according to their age: Group 1 (3-year-olds), Group 2 (4-year-olds), and Group 3 (5-year-olds).
The major findings of the present study are as follows. First, our children had performed significantly better on count classifiers than on mass classifiers (p<0.05). Second, age effects were found significant in subjects’ responses to overall count and mass classifiers (p<0.05). The Scheffe post hoc further indicated that a significant difference existed between Group 1 and Group 2, between Group 1 and Group 3, not between Group 2 and Group 3 (p>0.05). In other words, the age between three and four was found to be a critical stage in Chinese children’s classifier development. Third, there was a significant difference between the subjects’ comprehension and production (p<0.05). Our subjects showed better abilities in comprehension than in production of classifiers. Fourth, the results indicated that ge was the earliest acquired classifier whereas standard measures caused our children major difficulties, and thus they were acquired latest. Finally, the children’s misuse of the classifier ge exhibited overgeneralization. Our subjects predominately used ge to classify objects regardless of different semantic meanings. Their overwhelming use of ge indicated that ge was considered UNMARKED by our subjects.
|
|---|
