Toward a Chinese Vocabulary Measurment

• Main Authors: Pei-Yu Yu, 余姵妤
• Other Authors: Yi-Chun Kuo
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/00845039753090218677

碩士 === 國立嘉義大學 === 外國語言學系研究所 === 101 === Abstract In research on children’s lexical acquisition, there is a debate on whether children’s early vocabulary show noun bias universally. Gentner (1982) pointed out noun bias in children’s early lexicon is a universal phenomenon because nouns are conceptually easier and simpler than verbs. This is on the basis of Natural Partitions Hypothesis, the cognitive determinism, that cognitive difficulty determines the order of children’s acquiring words. However, Tardif (1993) based on the data she collected from Mandarin-speaking children, argued against the universal of noun bias. She showed that Mandarin-speaking children acquire more verbs than nouns in their early lexicon. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn &; Dunn, 1981) is an untimed test of receptive vocabulary for Standard American English and provides a quick estimate of verbal ability and scholastic aptitude. However, the Chinese version (Lu &; Liou, 1998) is translated from English version (Dunn &; Dunn, 1981) thus contains mostly nouns so may underestimate Chinese children’s lexicon. Therefore, this study aims to develop a Mandarin Chinese vocabulary measurement to evaluate the lexicon of Mandarin speaking children. The data are spontaneous speech, including ten language samples of Mandarin children aged from 2 to 6.