Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Early Vocabulary Development In English, Mandarin, And Cantonese : A Cross-Linguistic Study Based On Childes, Shuxia Liu

Master's Theses

Early language development is an exciting topic in the field of child language acquisition. Only a limited amount of cross-linguistic studies has attempted to investigate the similarities and differences in child language development across different languages. In this thesis, I present a study based on English, Mandarin and Cantonese corpora extracted from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES, MacWhinney, 2000). I investigated the lexical compositions of certain lexical categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in children and their caregivers’ vocabularies across eight different children age groups ranging from 13 to 60 months. ANOVA, frequency analysis, and cluster analysis were used …