| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 97 === Researchers focusing on early bilingual acquisition have long debated whether a child acquires the two distinctive languages autonomously or interdependently. Various linguistic features including noun/verb phrases, word order, negation and so on have been examined. However, no consensus of the debate on Interdependent Development Hypothesis and Separate System Hypothesis has been reached yet. While quite a few scholars examined various language pairs, few looked at Mandarin-English pair. Consequently, the current researcher focused on Mandarin-English pair, and examined the development of negators in both languages to see if the linguistic transfer phenomenon exists. The participant of this study is a two-year-old Mandarin-English bilingual child who was exposed in a one-parent-one-language environment in Taiwan. The father addressed her in Mandarin and her mother in English. Audio and video recordings were adopted from the child’s age of 2;1 to 3;2 (excluded 2;12 and 3;1) in a naturalistic setting. The data were all gathered by Chen, the child’s mother, who adopted the data in her own thesis (Chen, 2006). After receiving the data, the researcher transcribed it in CHAT format so that the data can be shared in the field of child language acquisition. The researcher paid attention to the position of “no”/“not” and “bu”/“mei” in English and Mandarin respectively in the child’s utterances. In addition, the child’s developmental rate of each negator was observed as well. The major findings of this study can be summarized as follows:
1. In terms of the use of negators, there was no sign of cross-linguistic influence from English to Mandarin and vise versa. In other words, the finding supports the Separate System Hypothesis.
2. Regarding the child’s developmental rate of negators in both languages, her development of both languages follows the same rate of English and Mandarin monolingual children’s. To wit, this finding is in favor of the Separate System Hypothesis as well.
To conclude, regarding negators in English and Mandarin, the interference does not seem to exist during the language development. The study offers one more piece of evidence to support the Separate System Hypothesis with a rarely-studied language pair.
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