A Study of Hakka Speaking Children's Acquisition of Negative Sentences in Early Childhood.

• Main Authors: LIN,JUEI-CHU, 林瑞菊
• Other Authors: Fahn,rueihlimg
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/30389814718353697932

碩士 === 國立聯合大學 === 客家語言與傳播研究所 === 99 === This research aims to investigate how bilingual Hakka speaking children acquire negative sentences in their early childhood. Negators, semantics, word order, and mean length of utterances (MLU) were analyzed to see if the development of negative sentences accords with Universal Grammar (UG). The naturalistic approach was adopted to observe and record spontaneous verbal behavior of two Hakka children, one hour each week. I coded transcript word by word to extract negators and negative sentences for further statistical analysis. The research focused on simple negative sentence patterns containing words pronounced as 【mˇ 】,【moˇ】, and【mangˇ】. The results showed that bilingual Hakka speaking children use negators a little later than monolingual Mandarin speaking children, 【moˇ】appears first, followed by 【mˇ 】and【mangˇ】. In terms of semantics, highly-used sentence patterns are acquired first, so sentences with refusal meaning are acquired sooner than sentences with non-existence meaning, while sentences with denial meaning are acquired last. In negative sentence patterns, children use simple negative structure earlier than complex one and negators appear at the initial position first, then the sentence final position, and finally the sentence internal position. Hakka speaking children hence has similar language developmental stages as Mandarin and English speaking children do. Regarding MLU, parents’conversation strategies, using both Mandarin and Hakka, would affect children’s MLU but if both languages were calculated, Hakka speaking children’s MLU is similar to that of monolingual Mandarin speaking children. Therefore, UG seems to be applicable in terms of negative sentence acquisition of Hakka speaking children.