| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北護理健康大學 === 語言治療與聽力研究所 === 106 === The purpose of this research was to investigate the lexical-semantic organization of different word classes in Mandarin-speaking preschool and school-age children in order to understand children’s lexical-semantic organization development during the period of syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift. A total of 60 Mandarin-speaking participants, including 30 preschool children (mean age: 5 years 8 months) and 30 school-age children (mean age: 8 years 10 months) were recruited in this research. Participants were required to complete a discrete word association task containing different word classes, including nous, verbs, and adjectives.
Results revealed that there were differences between Mandarin-speaking preschool and school-age children’s lexical-semantic organization. Preschool children organized nous with both syntagmatic and paradigmatic organization, but started to show the tendency of paradigmatic domination. They organized verbs syntagmatically, but have not developed a specific way to organize adjectives in their mental lexicon. School-age children demonstrated mainly paradigmatic organization for nous, verbs and adjectives in their mental lexicon. Even though there was no significant difference between their syntagmatic and paradigmatic response toward verbs, school-age children did provide more paradigmatic response. Between preschool children and school-age children’s responses, it was found that school-age children provided significantly more paradigmatic response than preschool children did in all word classes, nous verbs and adjectives. In conclusion, the present examination indicated that there was a syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift during preschool to school-age in Mandarin-speaking children’s lexical-semantic organization.
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