Chapter 5 Discussion and Conclusion
5.2. Conclusion
5.2.2. Limitation and future study
All of the measured items about vocabulary growth and vocabulary organization in this study have revealed general developmental trends of children’s early Mandarin vocabulary. Although this study has tried to provide evidence to support the findings of children’s early vocabulary acquisition of past studies, there are still some limitations in this study and some suggestions for future studies.
The limitations are about the frequency calculation and the analysis of polysemous words. Most of the results, except for NVR and D values, are obtained by counting frequency and computing the percentage. The calculation may be effected by different sample sizes. For instance, some categories have relatively fewer types intrinsically, such as conjunction words and modals in lexical categories, and shapes, colors and numerals in semantic categories. Type frequency calculation would lead to strange numbers in these categories. A better calculation needs to be considered in future works.
Furthermore, the total frequency in an age group was computed when analyzing semantic categories and conceptual levels. It did not represent the real performance of every single child. Instead, it is more like a collection of all vocabulary from all children.
If a study aims to examine individual performance, the calculation needs to be revised.
Another limitation is that this study did not differentiate polysemous words in the analysis. A polysemous word has more than one meaning. For example, 菜 (cài) means vegetable which is a specific, or it can be ingredients of meals which is more general. It needs further consideration whether to count 菜 (cài) as one word or as more than one word which depends on the meanings it has.
Besides, suggestions for future studies are to compare with the MCDI wordlist and another corpus like CHILDE. Some vocabulary in TCCM would overlap with the
lexicon or basic vocabulary in children’s early language. With core lexicon or basic vocabulary, researcher can develop measurements or teaching materials for young children. In addition, the issue of language development of young children is worth including gender difference into analysis. Boys and girls may show different performance in acquiring and producing words of different lexical categories, semantic categories, and conceptual levels. Likewise, it is also worthy of comparing typically-developing children with children of specific language impairment (SLI) to examine whether there is a different development trend for SLI children.
In conclusion, this study has tried to provide evidence for the findings of past studies of language acquisition with a corpus-based method, and to provide a complete scope of early vocabulary development of Mandarin-speaking children before 4 years old in Taiwan. The methodology and results in this study may provide some inspiration to those who are interested in language acquisition of Mandarin or other languages.
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