國立交通大學
英語教學研究所碩士論文
A Master Thesis Presented to Institute of TESOL, National Chiao Tung University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts
從台灣幼兒中英口語故事看構詞與句法能力
Morphological and Syntactic Abilities in Taiwanese EFL
Children’s Oral Narratives
研究生：江盈潔 Graduate: Ying-Chieh Chiang
指導教授：林律君博士 Advisor: Dr. Lu-Chun Lin
中華民國 九十八 年 六 月 June, 2009
論文名稱：從台灣幼兒中英口語故事看構詞與句法能力 校所組別：國立交通大學英語教學研究所 畢業時間：九十七學年度第二學期 指導教授：林律君博士 研究生：江盈潔 中文摘要 有鑑於外語學習在台灣的日漸普及，兒童語言習得（children’s language acquisition）在過去數十年間比以往更受重視。為了解兒童語言習得，學者廣為 研究其構詞與句法發展(morphological and syntactic development)。因著，構詞與 句法處理為兒童語言習得中兩項基本要素，孩童的構詞與句法能力將能透過其口 語敘事的樣本予以分析。
因此，許多專家研究孩童說故事活動中的構詞與句法能力。許多探討孩童在 敘事情境下之構詞與句法發展的研究主要針對正常發展(typically-developing)和 異常發展(atypically-developing)孩童以及低成就孩童(children with low school achievement)。有些研究討論孩童的英語與母語習得，而在這些研究當中，大部 分所分析的語言，在音節類型和音韻成分本質上十分不同，但同是使用拉丁字母 且共有許多同源詞(cognates)，例如，英文與西班牙文。然而，卻較少研究針對 英文和非印歐語(例如，中文)的習得。除此之外，鮮少研究專文探討在敘事情境 下，以中文為母語，英文為外語之兒童的構詞與句法能力及跨語言影響 (cross-linguistic influences)。 因此，本研究為了解以英文為外語之台灣兒童的構詞與句法能力及跨語言影 響，致力於分析以看故事書敘述故事的方式所得到的口語述說語言樣本。本研究 首要探討在敘事情境下，以中文為母語，英文為外語之兒童的中英文構詞與句法 能力。再者，本研究亦探究在中英文口語述說樣本中可能存在的跨語言影響。此 外，孩童口語述說能力的分析(productivity)可決定中英文對於孩童的口語述說能 力是否有影響。 研究結果顯示，在口語述說能力的分析方面，以英文為外語之台灣兒童的中
文語言樣本中有較多的總共句數(number of modified C-units)、總詞彙數(number of total words)和相異詞彙數(number of different words)，而英文語言樣本中則有 較長的平均語句長度(mean length of modified C-unit in words)。在構詞錯誤 (morphological errors)分析方面，較多孩童在英文語言樣本中出現較多構詞錯 誤，相對而言，較少孩童在中文語言樣本中出現構詞錯誤。在句法結構(syntactic structures)的使用方面，較多孩童在中文語言樣本中使用多種類型的中文語法句 型；反之，較少孩童在英文語言樣本中使用不同的英文語法句型。除此之外，和 構詞與句法相關的跨語言影響方面，研究發現較多中文影響英文的結構；因此， 孩童的中文口語述說能力相對於英文口語述說能力較好。最後，希望本研究的發 現，能帶給早期兒童語言習得學者和教師們更多的應用與未來研究上的參考與建 議。
ABSTRACT
Children’s language acquisition has attracted more attention than it was before because of the widespread of second language learning and the increasing number of young learners over the last decades. In order to understand children’s language acquisition, their morphological and syntactic abilities has been widely investigated. Morphological and syntactic processing are the two basic processes involved in acquiring language skills for young learners. Children’s morphological and syntactic knowledge can be examined in their oral narratives.
As a result, many researchers have investigated children’s morphological and syntactic abilities in the storytelling task. A large number of studies on children’s acquisition of morphology and syntax in a narrative context have focused on
typically-developing children and atypically-developing children (e.g., children with specific language impairment) as well as children with low school achievement. Some studies have reported children’s acquisition of English and their first language. Most of the ESL studies with children have examined languages that differ substantially in types of syllables and phonemic components used, but that are similar in sharing the Latin alphabets and a large number of cognates such as the English-Spanish pairing. However, little research has studied pairings of English with non-Indo-European languages such as Chinese. Moreover, relatively few studies have specially
documented Chinese-speaking ESL children’s morphological and syntactic abilities as well as cross-linguistic influences in a narrative context.
This study, therefore, aimed at examining Taiwanese EFL children’s
morphological and syntactic abilities as well as possible cross-linguistic influences observed in their Mandarin and English narratives elicited by a wordless picture book, Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969). The main purpose of the present study was to
investigate Taiwanese EFL preschoolers’ morphological and syntactic abilities in their Mandarin and English stories. A subsidiary purpose was to examine the existence of possible cross-linguistic influences on their storytelling task. The children’s language productivity was also measured to determine whether there were significant language effects on the children’s language productivity in their stories.
The findings showed that, for language productivity measures, the Taiwanese EFL children produced higher number of modified C-units, number of total words, and number of different words but shorter mean length of modified C-unit in words in their Mandarin narratives than in English ones. Despite the fact that the children told stories of equal length in both the Mandarin and English narrative tasks, there were differences between the Mandarin and English stories in the children’s language productivity measures. For morphological errors, more children had more variety of English erroneous uses while relatively fewer children made Mandarin morphological errors. When it comes to measures of syntactic structures, the children used more variety of the pre-specified Mandarin syntactic structures than English ones. In addition, more cross-linguistic structures with influences at morphological and syntactic levels from Mandarin to English were identified. As a result, the children appeared to perform better in their Mandarin stories than in English ones. Finally, the findings from this work can provide early childhood professionals or educators with implications and suggestions for future research.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Everyone, please pay attention to the sentences on the blackboard. These
sentences were made by some of you. There are some typical errors in these sentences. Is Chiang Ying Chieh here? If yes, please raise your hand.” This is what I heard from my wring teacher after I handed in my writing assignment for the first time in a private language school. Of course, I didn’t raise my hands but at that moment, I felt extremely embarrassed. I wished there was a hole next to me so I could jump into it. I was desperate and didn’t want to write anything in English more. However, now, I have finished my master’s thesis “in English.” It’s hard for me to describe my joyfulness in words. Nevertheless, I would like to show my sincere appreciation for those who supported me during my graduate studies and provided me with assistance in my master’s thesis.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Lu-Chun Lin (林律君), for all her continuous advice and guidance during my years as a graduate student at the TESOL Institute of NCTU. It is she that ushered me into the field of children language acquisition and encouraged me to wade through frustrations on the way to my thesis completion. I learned from her how to conduct a study, how to get along well with young children, and more importantly, how to write my thesis more academically. In addition, I would also like to show my gratitude to my committee members, Dr. Stephanie W. Cheng (鄭維容) and Dr. Rong-Lan Yang (楊榮蘭), for insightful comments and valuable suggestions. Dr. Cheng in my thesis proposal reminded me of some points which I hadn’t noticed. A special thank-you is extended to all professors and faculties at the graduate Institute of TESOL of NCTU for providing assistance and encouragement.
sacrificed their playtime to tell me stories, I couldn’t have carried out the study. I also want to thank the CEO and the faculties of the English immersion kindergarten for helping me to collect the data there. In addition, I want to give many thanks for Teacher Miranda and Teacher Adrian for their taking care of me during my data collection.
Finally and most importantly, I want to express my appreciation and genuine love to my family and friends. I especially want to thank my beloved mom. Without her, I would not have the confidence to go through all the challenges in my life and the opportunities to experience how wonderful life is. “Ma-Ma Lan,” I love you very much. I also want to give thanks to my lovely little sister. When I looked pale and exhausted, she always blended fruit and vegetables into fresh juice and forced me to drink it all in her presence. Of course, I have to thank all of my friends from various facets of my life ─ Jue Wang, my linguistics mentor, who inspired my interest in linguistics; Hannah and Brian, my classmates during my graduate study, who shared a great deal of fun with me and pushed me to brace up; Pei-Wen and Dai-Hua, my classmates in the junior college, who always comfort me whenever I call them and burst into tears; Jeffery Weng, my thesis proofreader, who always helps me in my need; all of my students, who give me chances to teach them; finally, those, who made friends with me in various unexpected but unforgettable situations.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
中文摘要... i
ABSTRACT ... iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...v
TABLE OF CONTENTS ... vii
LIST OF TABLES ...x
LIST OF FIGURES ... xi
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ... xii
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION ...1
Purposes of the Study ...4
CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW ...6
The Significance of Morphological and Syntactic Development ...7
The Significance of Morphological Development ...8
The Significance of Syntactic Development ...9
Morphological and Syntactic Development ...11
Chinese Morphological and Syntactic Development ...11
English Morphological and Syntactic Development ...16
Morphological and Syntactic Development in Bilingual Children ...20
Studying Morphological and Syntactic Development in Children’s Narratives ...21
Language Productivity, Linguistic Structures and Cross-Linguistic Influences ...23
Language Productivity ...23
Linguistic Structures ...30
Summary ...37
CHAPTER THREE METHOD ...39
The Study ...39
Participants ...39
Procedures ...40
Transcriptions and Coding ...44
Transcription and Coding Reliability ...44
Measures of Language Productivity ...45
Measures of Linguistic Structures ...46
Mandarin Morphological Errors ...46
English Morphological Errors ...51
Mandarin Syntactic Structures ...52
English Syntactic Structures ...60
Measures of Cross-Linguistic Influences ...61
CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS ...65
Language Productivity ...66
Morphological Errors in Mandarin and English Narratives ...68
Syntactic Structures in Mandarin and English Narratives ...74
Cross-Linguistic Influences in Mandarin and English Narratives ...79
CHAPTER FIVE DISCUSSION ...86
Language Productivity of the Children’s Mandarin and English Narratives ...86
Morphological Errors in Mandarin and English Narratives ...89
Mandarin Morphological Errors ...89
English Morphological Errors ...90
Mandarin Syntactic Structures ... 93
English Syntactic Structures ... 94
Cross-Linguistic Influences in Mandarin and English Narratives ... 97
Limitations and Future Directions ... 101
Implications ... 102
REFERENCES ... 104
APPENDICES ... 115
Appendix A: Consent Form for the Kindergarten Administration: Chinese ... 115
Appendix B: Informed Consent Letter for Parents: Chinese ... 117
Appendix C: Parental Consent Form: Chinese ... 119
Appendix D: Parental Socioeconomic Information ... 121
Appendix E: List of Transcription and Coding Conventions Based on SALT ... 122
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1 Means, Standard Deviations, and Ranges for Mandarin and English Productivity
Measures ...67
Table 2 Correlations between Mandarin and English Productivity Measures .……...…....67
Table 3 Number of Children Making Mandarin and English Morphological Errors ...69
Table 4 Mandarin Morphological Errors ...70
Table 5 English Morphological Errors ...73
Table 6 Number of Children Using Mandarin and English Syntactic Structures ...75
Table 7 Mandarin Syntactic Structures ...75
Table 8 English Syntactic Structures ...79
Table 9 Number of Children Producing Influenced Utterances ...80
Table 10 English-influenced Mandarin Morphological Expressions ...81
Table 11 English-influenced Mandarin Syntactic Expressions ...81
Table 12 Mandarin-influenced English Morphological Expressions ...82
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Flow Chart of the Data Collection Procedures …………...………..43 Figure 2 Language Productivity Measures …….……...………..68 Figure 3 Cross-Linguistic Influences ……….………...……..84
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
CL Classifier
CRS Currently relevant state
DUR Durative EXP Experiential FW Friendly warning GEN Genitive PFV Perfective Q Question particle
REX Response to expectation
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the review of research evidence in children language acquisition has documented the importance of morphological and syntactic knowledge (e.g., Baayen, Feldman, & Schreuder, 2006; Franklin, Lindsey, & Bailey, 2004; Fukuda & Fukuda, 2001; Gutierrez-Clellen, 1998; Gutierrez-Clellen & Hofstetter, 1994; Lee & Naigles, 2008; Pe´rez-Leroux, Pirvulescu, & Roberge, 2008; Reilly, Losh, Bellugi, & Wulfeck, 2004; Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008; Treiman & Cassar, 1996).
Morphological and syntactic processing are the two basic processes involved in acquiring language skills for young children. Children’s morphological and syntactic knowledge can be assessed to understand their language acquisition. One challenge for achieving this understanding is that a large number of studies have measured children’s morphological and syntactic knowledge on standardized language
assessments (e.g., Barnett, Yarosz, Thomas, Jung, & Blanco, 2007; Yamashita, 2008), but these measures may have limited validity and may not elicit children’s
spontaneous speech, known as speech which is indeed produced spontaneously (Prins & Bastiaanse, 2004), or semi-spontaneous speech, as defined by Prins and Bastiaanse (2004), namely that which is elicited by situational pictures (e.g., Frog, where are you?).
Without the implementation of an effective method to elicit children’s spontaneous or semi-spontaneous speech, their morphological and syntactic
knowledge required to produce speech may either be underestimated or overestimated. Therefore, the selection of a suitable method capable of measuring children’s
speech is important. Oral narratives can provide an excellent quasi-naturalistic measure of children’s spontaneous languages, and reflect distinctive structural and linguistic changes (Reilly et al., 2004). Thus, children’s spontaneous use of
morphological and syntactic knowledge can be measured in their oral narratives. Most studies on children’s acquisition of morphology and syntax in a narrative context have focused on typically-developing children (e.g., Fiestas & Pena, 2004; Gutierrez-Clellen, 2002; Gutierrez-Clellen & Hofstetter, 1994; Hell, Verhoeven, Tak, & Oosterhout, 2005; Miller et al., 2006; Pearson, 2002) and atypically-developing children (e.g., children with specific language impairment (SLI), early focal brain injury, Williams syndrome, or autism) (e.g., Reilly et al., 2004; Tsou & Cheung, 2007; Wulfeck, Bates, Krupa-Kwiatkowski, & Saltzman, 2004) as well as children with low school achievement (e.g., Chi, 2001; 2003; Gutierrez-Clellen, 1998). Hell et al. (2005) studied how Dutch children used pronouns and passive construction in narrative text. Gutierrez-Clellen (1998) compared the syntactic skills of Spanish-speaking children with low and average school achievement using oral narratives.
Some of the aforementioned studies have reported children’s acquisition of English and their first language (e.g., Fiestas & Pena, 2004; Gutierrez-Clellen, 2002; Miller et al., 2006; Pearson, 2002; Serratrice, 2007). Serratrice (2007) investigated Italian EFL children’s nominal expressions in the Frog Story. Gutierrez-Clellen (2002) examined Spanish ESL children’s grammaticality in their oral narratives in two
languages using wordless picture books. Miller et al. (2006) measured Spanish ESL children’s lexical and syntactic structures in a narrative context. In Pearson’s (2002) study, 80 Spanish- and English-speaking and 40 English-speaking children told stories. The children’s use of selected verb forms, conjunctions, adverbs, and the specialized noun vocabulary were examined. Fiestas and Pena (2004) documented 12 ESL
children’s language productivity, grammaticality, and non-target language influences in their narratives across English and Spanish. Most of the above-mentioned ESL studies have examined languages that differ substantially in types of syllables and phonemic components used, but that are similar in sharing the Latin alphabets and a large number of cognates such as English-Spanish and English-Czech pairings. However, little research has studied pairings of English with non-Indo-European languages such as Cantonese and Mandarin (e.g., Wang, Cheng, & Chen, 2006). Wang et al. (2006) investigated the contribution of morphological awareness in
Chinese-English biliteracy acquisition. The findings indicated a cross-language morphological transfer in acquisition of a pairing of an alphabetic language with a non-Indo-European language (e.g., alphabetic and logographic). Moreover, relatively few studies have specially documented Chinese-speaking ESL children’s
morphological and syntactic abilities as well as cross-linguistic influences in a narrative context.
In a Chinese-speaking environment, a few available studies which examined children’s morphological and syntactic knowledge are working from pathological perspective (e.g., Tsou & Cheung, 2007) or with low-achievement learners (e.g., Chi, 2001; 2003). For example, Tsou and Cheung (2007) investigated Taiwanese
monolingual children’ s performance on linguistic indices (e.g., length of story, mean length of utterance, and use of complex sentences) in a narrative context. Those were high-functioning children with autism. For the purpose of understanding poor
Mandarin-speaking readers’ language performance, Chi (2001; 2003) examined their linguistic knowledge (e.g., cohesion and syntactic skills) in their oral narratives. Nevertheless, the findings of these studies are difficult to be generalized to typical population. Although in Au’s (2002) study, the expressive language abilities (e.g., the
use of syntactic structures and specific lexical items) of typically-developing Cantonese-speaking children were examined in a narrative task (re-telling the story with picture support), it focused primarily on Cantonese-speaking instead of
Mandarin-speaking population. Differences may be observed between Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children’s oral narratives.
Previous studies on children’s oral narratives used different types of narrative tasks. Some of these studies asked children to tell stories from wordless picture books (e.g., Fiestas & Pena, 2004; Tsou & Cheung, 2007). Some requested children to retell stories from memory with an ad (e.g., a wordless book and pictures) after a researcher told stories first (e.g., Au, 2002; Miller et al., 2006). For example, Fiestas and Pena (2004) investigated the effect of language on Spanish-speaking ESL children’s oral narratives in two languages in two ways─ one elicited by using a wordless picture book and the other by using a static picture. Miller et al. (2006) measured
Spanish-speaking ESL children’s lexical and syntactic structures in a story-retelling task. Once the examiner narrated a prescribed narrative of the story, the children retold the story with the pictures in the wordless book. In the present study, Taiwanese EFL children’s oral narratives in English and Mandarin were elicited by a wordless picture book, Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969).
Purposes of the Study
The main purpose of the present study was to investigate Taiwanese EFL preschoolers’ morphological and syntactic abilities in their Mandarin and English stories. A subsidiary purpose was to examine the existence of possible cross-linguistic influences on their storytelling task.
study were proposed as follows:
1. Do Mandarin-speaking EFL children have differential language productivity in their Mandarin and English narratives?
2. What types of Mandarin and English morphological errors do Mandarin-speaking EFL children make in their oral narratives? 3. What types of Mandarin and English syntactic structures do
Mandarin-speaking EFL children use in their oral narratives?
4. Is there any possible cross-linguistic influence in Mandarin-speaking EFL children’s oral narratives? If there is, what type is it?
It is hoped that answering theses questions could contribute to the understanding of the relation between children’s use of their developing morphological and syntactic knowledge and their language abilities in their English and Mandarin. In addition, the findings of this study might enhance parents’ understanding of children’s early first and second language abilities. For early childhood professionals or educators, the findings might provide them with insights into their curriculum design. As for researchers, they could be encouraged to conduct more cross-linguistic studies in an EFL context.
CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
Children’s language acquisition has attracted more attention than it was before because of the widespread of second language learning and the increasing number of young learners over the last decades (e.g., Fiestas & Pena, 2004; Gutierrez-Clellen, 2002; Miller et al., 2006; Serratrice, 2007). In order to understand children’s language acquisition, their morphological and syntactic development can be investigated. Morphological and syntactic processing are the two basic processes involved in acquiring language skills for young learners. Children’s morphological and syntactic knowledge can be examined in their oral narratives.
As indicated in Chapter One, the present study intended to elicit Mandarin and English morphological and syntactic knowledge from Taiwanese EFL children in a narrative context. This chapter, therefore, gave a review of important studies in the research areas involved in this specific research topic. First, this chapter offered a general introduction to the significance of morphological and syntactic development and gradually narrowed the focus down to the children’s morphological and syntactic development. Monolingual and ESL children’s morphological and syntactic
development were then discussed. Findings and results related to the present study were highlighted. Next section examined monolingual and ESL children’s
morphological and syntactic development in a narrative context. Typically-developing, atypically-developing and low-achievement children’s uses of their morphological and syntactic knowledge in their oral narratives were introduced. The last section of the chapter discussed the measures frequently used to evaluate children’s language abilities in their oral narratives. Concepts such as language productivity, linguistic
structures, and possible cross-linguistic influences were presented as well.
The Significance of Morphological and Syntactic Development
Children’s morphological and syntactic development is of crucial importance for understanding their language acquisition. As children develop their language, their morphological and syntactic knowledge emerges. Morphological knowledge refers to the knowledge “of the internal structure of words and, of the rules by which words are formed” (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2003, p. 76). Syntactic knowledge means the knowledge “of sentences and their structures” (Fromkin et al., 2003, p. 118).
Children’s ability to construct sentences from words reveals their use of
morphosyntactic knowledge. In order to understand children’s language development, their morphosyntactic knowledge can be evaluated. Wulfeck et al. (2004) in a
pathological study mentioned, “We focus on morphosyntax because limitations in grammatical abilities are among the most common and persistent features in [children with] SLI” (p. 215). The morphosyntactic development of atypically-developing children such as children with SLI or with focal brain lesions is usually compared with that of typically-developing counterparts to provide evidence of their
vulnerability of morphology and syntax.
Morphosyntactic knowledge also plays an important role in young learners’ academic success (Pearson, 2002). Children who experience difficulty in dealing with language tasks that require the use of explicit, precise language in complex sentences and paragraph frequently exhibit academic difficulties (Gregg, 1991). Children’s use of morphosyntactic knowledge may reveal important information about their facility to meet academic requirements. When children move up through the grades, their ability to tackle longer passages in all subject matters is crucial. To understand and
produce longer passages, children must be capable of using their knowledge of words and sentences. At early school age, children have acquired most of their knowledge of how to combine morphemes into words and words into sentences.
Finally, morphological and syntactic knowledge (which together comprise grammar) has been regarded as one of the reliable measures of second language proficiency (Komarova, Niyogi, & Nowak, 2001; Marinova-Todd, 2003). For
instance, Johnson and Newport (1989) studied English proficiency attained by native speakers of Chinese or Korean learning English as a second language. A
grammaticality-judgment test which measured different types of English grammar was used. The findings concluded that the first language did not have a measurable effect on the acquisition of a second language. Therefore, learners’ morphosyntactic development can reveal their ESL development.
The Significance of Morphological Development
Morphological knowledge is important in interpreting meaning and assigning grammatical function to the smallest meaningful unit in a language. Goldin-Meadow, Mylander, and Franklin (2007) noted, “Although there is great variability in how much within-word structure a given language has, it is nevertheless difficult to find a language that has no structure at the word level” (p. 89). Due to the universality of morphological knowledge in languages, it has been widely examined to understand learners’ language abilities.
Some studies have highlighted the importance of morphological development for children’s language acquisition (e.g., Baayen et al., 2006; Franklin et al., 2004;
Fukuda & Fukuda, 2001; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Jia & Fuse, 2007; Treiman & Cassar, 1996). For example, Treiman and Cassar (1996) indicated that morphological knowledge played a predictive role in child early spelling acquisition. In a Japanese
language acquisition study, Fukuda and Fukuda (2001) examined children’s ability to construct implicit procedural rules for morphology. The results have proved that the deficit in morphology among the children with SLI affected their morphological processing in comparison with their typically-developing counterparts. Baayen et al. (2006) conducted a study on visual lexical decision and word naming experiments to gauge the importance of morphological measures as well as frequency in the lexical processing of morphologically simple words of young participants. The results showed that morphological measures emerged as strong predictors in visual lexical decision, while not in word naming task, providing evidence for the importance of morphological knowledge even for the recognition of morphologically simple words.
In another study (Franklin et al., 2004), a word identification task was used to examine Spanish-speaking English-learning children’s development of English- and Spanish-reading skills. It has been concluded that morphological measures were identified as strong predictors in the children’s lexical processing. Jia and Fuse (2007) conducted a 5-year longitudinal study to investigate the acquisition of six English grammatical morphemes by 10 Mandarin-speaking ESL children and adolescents. Their morphological proficiency was measured by the accuracy of these morphemes in obligatory contexts during spontaneous speech. The results showed that if the average percentage correct across all testing sections was counted, progressive –ing and regular past tense respectively elicited the highest and the lowest level of accuracy. Notably, this pattern was the same for both children and adolescents ESL learners. Morphological knowledge, therefore, has been frequently used to tap into individuals’, especially young learners’, language abilities.
The Significance of Syntactic Development
used in evaluating children’s language ability. As Marinellie (2004) noted, “complex syntax is necessary as children are increasingly required to describe, persuade report, predict outcomes, imagine, direct, and infer cause in daily classroom oral and written activities” (p. 518). To meet school requirements, children should be capable of using their complex syntax. In addition, complex language is important to children as meaning relationships in a language can never be adequately expressed in simple sentences (Scott, 1988). Children’s capability of producing complex sentences is required for the purpose of expressing their ideas clearly and accurately. Studies with English-speaking children have showed that learners with academic language
difficulties may have problems in producing complex sentences (Bradley-Johnson & Lesiak, 1989; Gregg, 1991). Children’ production of complex syntax is highly pertinent to their academic language development. On the other hand, learners’ proficiency in complex syntax can facilitate literacy development such as reading comprehension (Oakhill & Garnham, 1988; Yuill & Oakhill, 1991).
Several studies have confirmed the importance of complex syntax in children’s language acquisition process (e.g., Gutierrez-Clellen, 1998; Gutierrez-Clellen & Hofstetter, 1994; Lee & Naigles, 2008; Pe´rez-Leroux et al., 2008; Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008). Thothathiri and Snedeker (2008) reported that young children used abstract syntactic representations in an online sentence comprehension task. The results of an experimental work (Pe´rez-Leroux et al., 2008) supported the conclusion that French- and English-speaking children’s lexical learning in the verbal domain was driven by syntax. Lee and Naigles (2008) have noted that Mandarin-speaking children used their syntactic knowledge in verb learning. Therefore, the measure of children’s developing knowledge of syntax can reflect their current language development and predict their later academic performance.
Morphological and Syntactic Development
The process of acquiring the implicit and explicit knowledge of morphology and syntax is long and gradual. At an early age, children start to develop their implicit knowledge of morphology and syntax. For example, Berko’s (1958) pioneering study using the “Wug Test” examined children’s ability to give correct morphemes for novel nouns and verbs in an elicited production task. Results showed that the preschool and first-grade children succeeded in such a task. Hence, they possessed internalized knowledge about English morphological rules.
Around the age of 18 months, children start to string words together (Brown, 2000). This can be observed in their early two-word or three-word sentences (e.g., allgone milk). Children are capable of using their syntactic knowledge to form sentences at an early age. Researchers (Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, Cymerman, & Levine, 2002) supported that typically-developing children progressed through a predictable sequence of stages and became proficient in the basic syntactic relations of simple sentences at a relatively early age. Several studies (e.g., Brown, 1973; Fromkin et al., 2003; Reilly, Bates, & Marchman, 1998; Slobin, 1985) have noted that by age 5, most typically-developing children can generally access most of the
morphosyntactic structures of their language. Their understanding of how and when to fluently and flexibly use these structures in specific discourse genres continues to develop well into adolescence (Reilly et al., 2004).
Chinese Morphological and Syntactic Development
Before elaborating on children’s Chinese morphosyntactic development, this study should first clarify a critical question, that is, what is a Chinese word? Different schools of linguistics usually have distinctive definitions of a Chinese word.
semantic independence and integrity” (p. 13). Polysyllabic forms such as pu2tao2 ‘grape’ and bo1li2 ‘glass’ constitute single words despite the fact that they consist of two characters.
For children’s Chinese morphological development, Tse, Tang, Shie, and Li (1991) reported Taiwanese monolingual children’s developmental process of
morphological acquisition. The following stages were adopted from their study. The children’s first identifiable word production appeared at around the 11th month. At this stage, the children simply imitated adults’ speech. These initial identifiable words involved nouns, appearing as the largest in number, verbs, and dexical terms including demonstratives, certain time adverbs, certain place adverbs, and deictic verbs. At the age of 11 to 16 months, they started to produce deictic expressions, particles, aspect markers, and adverbs. The emergence of their first particles included a0 indicating “[the reduction of] forcefulness,” (Li & Thompson, 1981, p. 238), ou1 “friendly
warning,” (Li & Thompson, 1981, p. 238), and ye1, the expression of happiness. Later, they used le0 expressing “currently relevant state,” (Li & Thompson, 1981, p. 238), ne1 “response to expectation,” (Li & Thompson, 1981, p. 238), ma1 “question,” (Li & Thompson, 1981, p. 238), and ba1“solicit agreement” (Li & Thompson, 1981, p. 238). For the children’s adverb development, Tse et al. also confirmed that manner adverbs “expressing speaker’s attitude, manner of action, frequency, and qualification” (p.11) emerged earlier than adverb with presupposition.
One of the most distinctive features of Mandarin noun phrases is the use of classifiers from an English speaker’s point of view. In the same study by Tse et al., at the age of 19 months, the children started to use the generic classifier ge0 (e.g. yi1ge0ren2 ‘a person’ and san1ge0he2zi0 ‘three boxes’) and the classifier ben3 (e.g. yi1ben3shu1 ‘a book’) without a following noun. A noun phrase in the form of a
classifier phrase, consisting of a number and a classifier, plus a noun appeared at the 20th month. The generic classifier ge0 was used whenever the children could not think of a specific classifier to use.
The children in the same study began to use their first modal auxiliary (e.g., hui4 expressing “know how” or “will”) at the age of 19 months. The children’s first connectors emerged at the 19th month as well. Their earliest connectors functioned as turn holders to proclaim that they wanted to say something (e.g., a1 expressing feelings and en0 making a response). However, it was common to discover the children’s use of two connectors at the same time. As for coverb acquisition, when they were 22 months old, coverbs (e.g., locative zai4 and benefactive gei3) emerged. Coverbs, as defined by Li and Thompson (1981), are as follows:
… a class of morphemes in Mandarin which includes such words as gen1 ‘with’, cong2 ‘from’, … zai4 ‘at’, used in locative constructions, ba3, the marker of the Ba construction , bi3, the comparative morpheme, bei4, the marker of the passive construction, and . . . gei3, the marker of benefactive and indirect object
constructions . . . . The coverb introduces a noun phrase, and the phrase formed by the coverb plus the noun phrase generally precedes the main verb and follows the subject or topic. (p. 356)
For example:
wo3 yao3 gen1 ta1 shuo1hua4 I want with 3sg talk-speech
I want to talk with him/ her. 我要跟他說話
Later, prior to the age of 25 months, the children in the same study tended to use nouns in the production where pronouns were more suitable.
In terms of Chinese syntactic acquisition, Tse et al. (1991) observed Taiwanese monolingual children’s developmental process. The findings showed that the
children’s single-word and two-word sentences first emerged at the 11th and 13th month respectively but they were more like imitations of adult speech. Multiple-word sentences appeared as early as the 13th month but not until the 19th month did they occur more frequently.
According to Hsu (2003), Taiwanese monolingual children in his study expanded their utterances roughly from the age of 23 to 30 months. In particular, their verb phrases grew in length. A verb began to take a sentence as its object. This can be classified as belonging to one type of the serial verb construction. The serial verb construction is a structure consisting of two or more verb phrases or clauses
juxtaposed without any marker signifying what the relationship is between them (Li & Thompson, 1981). In one type of the serial verb construction, a clause can be the direct object of the first verb. Therefore, it can be inferred that these Taiwanese children began to acquire the serial verb construction around this age.
Sentence linking construction in Chinese is defined as “sentences composed of two linked clauses . . . [and] each of the two constituent clauses contains a linking element . . . .” (Li & Thompson, 1981, p. 632). The meaning completion of each clause depends on the other clause. According to Li & Thompson (1981), this
dependence can be established either by a specific linking element (e.g. a conjunction or an adverb) or by the speaker’s intention. Children’s development of sentence linking can be observed from their acquisition of compound sentences.
(2003) study, during the 2 years from 2;4 (years;months) to 4;2, there were no conjunctions explicitly expressed in the surface structures of Taiwanese monolingual children’s compound sentences. However, some conjunctions could be inferred from phonological cues. Later, from the age of 4;2 to 6;0 and beyond, conjunctions began to be used frequently but not always correctly.
As for the children’s acquisition of the Ba-construction, Tse et al. (1991) documented that it occurred as early as the children were 1;9. Although the children produced Ba-sentences at an early stage, they still made mistakes as late as the age of 5;10. Their mistakes can be categorized into four types. First, the children used the verb inappropriately. Although they had acquired the meaning of the verb, they had not mastered the sense of disposal of it. The verbs used in the Ba construction should have a clear sense of disposal against the interests of the subject. Second, the children omitted the object when a direct object in Ba-construction must be placed directly after Ba and should never be deleted. Addition of a sentence as the object after the verb was the third type of mistakes. Finally, the children failed to produce
Ba-sentences based on its formulaic word order. According to the above-mentioned mistake types, it can be referred that the Ba-construction is a relatively difficult syntactic structure for children to acquire so it can only be fully mastered at a fairly late age.
The Bei-construction is also difficult for children to acquire at an early age. In the same study by Tse et al. (1991), the Bei-construction emerged in the children’s production when they were 2;5. The children continued to make mistakes as late as they were at the age of 5;10. These mistakes can be grouped into three types. First, the children produced Bei-sentences without implying a sense of adversity. The verbs used in the Bei construction should have a clear sense of adversity against the
interests of the subject. Second, an intransitive verb or a verb whose meaning was already passive was used in a Bei-passive. Finally, the agent noun phrase and the subsequent verb were omitted.
After the age of 5 years, in Hsu’s (2003) study, the children did not really violate any major structural rules; their mistakes were mostly resulted from selection rules, especially in the choice of function words. Their misuse of word order was no longer a serious problem afterwards.
English Morphological and Syntactic Development
Morphological devices (e.g., pronouns, determiners, adverbs, and conjunctions) can help connect individual phrases smoothly (Pearson, 2002). At early school age, children have acquired most of their knowledge of how to combine morphemes into words and words into sentences. Fromkin et al. (2003) have noted that there are several stages of English-speaking children’s morphological development. In
children’s acquisition of morphology, their morphological errors reveal that they have acquired the regular grammatical rules but overgeneralized them. In the acquisition of an irregular morphological form, children use the correct word such as ‘brought’ or ‘broke’ which are treated as separate lexical entries. That is, children do not relate the form ‘brought’ to ‘bring’ at this stage. Then, at the second stage, children construct a rule for forming a word and attach the regular morpheme to all words. Later, children learn that there are exceptions to the rule. English-speaking children’s morphological rules emerge quite early.
There has been a great interest in English-speaking children’s acquisition of morphology. In Brown’s pioneering study (as cited in Cho & O’Grady, 1997) of three English-speaking children between the ages of 20 months and 36 months, their
and auxiliaries) was observed. The developmental sequence was as follows: ‘-ing’, plural ‘-s’, possessive ‘-’s’, the and a, past tense ‘-ed’, third person singular ‘-s’, and auxiliary be. This development took place in an orderly sequence with relatively little variation from child to child. Therefore, children before the age of 3 years have used progressive, plural, possessive, determiners, past tense, third person singular, and auxiliaries in their production. Caselli et al. (1995) conducted a study to investigate the initial expressive and receptive lexical development of 659 English infants
between 8 and 16 months of age using parental report data. The finding indicated that the children began with words which were difficult to be grouped into adult
part-of-speech categories such as "routines" and later, a steady growth of common nouns followed. However, the emergence of verbs, adjectives, and grammatical function words (e.g., prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, and
determiners) were relatively late until the children acquired at least 100 words. That is, among very young English-speaking children, lexical verbs did not emerge until the development of common nouns was well-established in their growing lexicon.
For children’s acquisition of modal auxiliary, Quigley (2000) reported that children’s modal auxiliary emerged gradually between the age of 1;0 and 2;6. Their initial use of verb auxiliary often included a single or negative modal form in limited contexts and with a limited set of meanings. Later on, it developed relatively rapidly. Kuczaj formed that the secondary modals such as "would" developed relatively late around the age of 5 years (as cited in Quigley, 2000). In general, by age 5, most modals were in use.
In the case of pronoun acquisition, Chiat reported that most 3-year-old children used the full range of pronouns spontaneously (as cited in Chiat, 1999). Deutsch and Pechmann (as cited in Chiat, 1999) commented that there were few instances of
incorrect pronoun uses. Pronoun errors mostly included a demonstrative pronoun alone or a demonstrative pronoun combined with a personal pronoun, a combination of two singular pronouns, or a name alone or combined with a personal pronoun in substitution for the target pronoun.
In children’s acquisition of English syntax, Fromkin et al. (2003) have proposed the following developmental stages. Around the age of 2 years, English-speaking children began to put words together. These utterances seemed to be strings of two of children’s earlier holophrastic utterances with each word having its own
single-pitched contour. Soon, they started to form sentences with clear syntactic and semantic relations. In children’s earliest multiword utterances, they were inconsistent in their use of grammatical morphemes such as function words. It took children several months to master their use of grammatical morphemes and auxiliary verbs consistently. By the age of 3 years, most children were consistent in their use of function morphemes and began to produce and understand complex sentences including coordinated sentences and embedded sentences of various types.
There are two types of embedded sentences (Przetacznik-Gierowska, 1995). One type of the embedded sentences can play the syntactic roles such as subject, object, or indirect object. A noun clause can be embedded as an object into a sentence (e.g., She knows that Venus is the goddess of love and beauty in Greek mythology). Therefore, children at the age of 3 years have gradually developed their knowledge of noun clauses. Children have also been aware of constituent structures and syntactic rules although they may often omit function morphemes in their correct use of word order, case marking and agreement rules. Roughly between the age of 2;6 and 3;6, children developed their language at a faster rate than they used to do. At this phase, it was difficult to identify different acquisition stages because children developed their
language rapidly.
As for the acquisition of relative clauses, the knowledge of relative clauses enables children to lengthen noun phrases. They can add relative clauses after noun phrases to make them longer. However, relative clauses are not common in children’s speech. Ingram (as cited in Ingram, 1989) has argued that there was a lack of relative clauses in spontaneous speech of children between 2 and 5 years old. However, she has indicated that children have acquired relative clauses around age 4;0 but the productivity in their use, which was the characteristic of adult speech, has not appeared yet. Several studies (e.g., Corrêa, 1986; Limber, 1973; Menyuk, 1971, as cited in Corrêa, 1995) have confirmed that children’s production of relative clauses began very early in childhood. However, these early production may not fully demonstrate knowledge assumed to be required in comprehension (Labelle, 1990; Menyuk, 1971; Tavakolian, 1981, as cited in Corrêa, 1995). Children show difficulty in comprehending relative clauses at an early age so they produce few relative clauses.
As to the acquisition of passive construction, the passive is frequently taken as an instance of linguistic complexity, relative to active sentences. Studies (e.g., Beilin, 1975; Olson & Nickerson, 1977, as cited in Elliot, 1981) have addressed that a young child’s ability to correctly use the passive voice depends on aspects of the event described by the utterances, his/ her role inferred from the utterance and the linguistic context. Around age 4 years, children began to notice the syntactic differences
between active and passive sentences (Dewart, 1975; Strohner & Nelson, 1974, as cited in Elliot, 1981). It was not until the age of 7 years that children understood the relation between active and passive constructions (Beilin, 1975, as cited in Elliot, 1981). In general, as informed by scholars (Chomsky, 1969; Slobin, 1973), children
by age 5 have used major syntactic structures of their languages as they continue to enlarge the range and complexity of their applications of these structures during school age.
Morphological and Syntactic Development in Bilingual Children
The predominant view regarding the way that children learn the structure of two languages supports that it is parallel to what is observed among monolingual children in each language. As Romaine (1995) noted, “the majority of studies seem to support the conclusion that the developmental sequence for the bilingual child is the same in many respects as for the monolingual” (p. 217). While learning two languages simultaneously, children understand the distinction between these two languages (Meisel, 1990; 1993). They also learn the structure of each language in much the same way that the corresponding monolinguals do.
In two early studies on the acquisition order of morphemes, Dulay and Burt (as cited in Ellis, 1994) investigated Spanish-speaking and Chinese-speaking ESL children at age 6 to 8 years. They reported that the acquisition order for a group of English morphemes remained the same irrespective of the learners’ native language or of the methods they used to measure the accuracy of the morphemes. Gathercole (as cited in Bialystok, 2001) investigated syntactic mastery of Spanish-English ESL and English and Spanish monolingual children at age 7 and 9 years. The results showed that the ESL children lagged behind their monolingual peers in acquiring the correct syntactic structures. Nonetheless, their progress was identical and the structures were learned in the same order and manner. Therefore, the language acquisition process of monolingual and ESL children is quite similar. ESL children may show delay in their acquisition of the second language or both languages.
Studying Morphological and Syntactic Development in Children’s Narratives Children may show their language-based aspects of academic readiness in their oral narrative production (Gutierrez-Clellen, 2002). To meet academic needs, children should be capable of using their language-based knowledge. While telling stories, children use their language-based knowledge (e.g., morphosyntactic knowledge) in their oral narratives. Morphosyntactic knowledge is essential for young learners to achieve their academic success (Pearson, 2002). Therefore, children’s
morphosyntactic knowledge can be measured to indicate whether they have academic difficulties in their oral narratives.
Narrative development even at preschool level can predict children’s later literacy development (Griffin, Hemphill, Camp, & Wolf, 2004; Snow & Dickinson, 1990; Torrance & Olson, 1984). Preschoolers’ narratives can be analyzed to predict their later literacy development. At the preschool age, children are in the process of developing their narrative skills. Children as young as 3 years old have acquired their basic narrative skills (Appleby, 1978). Later on, at age 10, children use richer lexica and more embedding sentences in their stories (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986). Narrative can be a rich context in which researchers examine children’s use of syntactic structures to serve narrative functions (Reilly et al., 1998). In addition, researchers can measure children’s syntactic knowledge in their narratives to indicate developmental
differences (Gutierrez-Clellen & Hoffstetter, 1994). Therefore, children’s narratives even at preschool level can provide researchers with insight into their
morphosyntactic development.
Nevertheless, children’s knowledge of language is often examined through standardized language proficiency tests which may have limited or no validity and consequently may not accurately reflect children’s language proficiency
(Gutierrez-Clellen, 2002). There are three reasons to support that oral narration is better than traditional language proficiency test in measuring children’s
morphosyntactic knowledge. First, on the microstructural level, narrators can demonstrate their knowledge of cohesion and coherence through different types of connectives and adjusting tense, pronouns, and anaphoric reference (Hedberg & Westby, 1993). However, most language proficiency tests simply assess learners’ morphological and syntactic knowledge separately. To put that differently, traditional language proficiency tests focus on the examination of children’s sentence-level knowledge while narration highlights discourse-level knowledge such as pronoun use. Another reason is that there are many features of written discourse in the oral genre of narrative (Chafe, 1980; 1982). Therefore, oral narration can reveal children’s writing development. As it is known, testing children’s early language skills is difficult because their abilities are still developing until the middle elementary school level. Hence, to understand children’s current language development, researchers can assess children’s morphosyntactic knowledge in their oral narratives. Thirdly, some literacy educators have long acknowledged that human minds sequence experiences in the mode of story, whether real or virtual (Fox, 2003). Therefore, children can produce linguistic output similar to what exists inside their minds in their stories. To
understand young learners’ morphosyntactic development to a greater extent, children’s narration is an appropriate practice.
Some studies have utilized oral narratives to examine the morphological and syntactic development of young monolingual learners (e.g., Bliss, McCabe, &
Miranda, 1998; Gutierrez-Clellen, 1998; Gutierrez-Clellen & Hofstetter, 1994; Reilly et al., 2004; Tsou & Cheung, 2007) and young ESL learners (e.g., Fiestas & Pena, 2004; Miller et al., 2006; Pearson, 2002). In Tsou and Cheung’s (2007) study,
Mandarin-speaking high-functioning children with autism and typically-developing counterparts told stories. Their narrative samples were analyzed to disclose their development of morphology and syntax. The findings showed that the
high-functioning group performed comparatively well in complex sentences. In Pearson’s (2002) study, 80 Spanish-English ESL children at second and fifth grades told stories from the wordless picture book, Frog, where are you? Children’s use of selected verb forms, conjunctions, adverbs, and the specialized noun vocabulary were examined. The results indicated that ESL children’s degree of elaboration and
embedding in complex sentences was similar across languages, but knowledge of vocabulary items and general well-formedness of sentences were not similar.
Language Productivity, Linguistic Structures and Cross-Linguistic Influences Measures of language productivity (e.g., average sentence length) can be used to determine whether there are significant language effects on the children’s language productivity (Fiestas & Pena, 2004). Language productivity measures in the present study were calculated as the number of modified communication units (NMC), the mean length of modified communication unit in words (MLMCW), the number of total words (NTW), and the number of different words (NDW). Measures of linguistic structures can provide insight into children’s grammatical production (Reilly et al., 2004). Morphological errors as well as syntactic structures used were assessed in the present study to indicate the children’s language abilities. Finally, measures of possible cross-linguistic influences can improve the understanding of the processes and the outcomes of acquiring more than one language (Miller et al., 2006).
Language Productivity
of language productivity measures to examine speakers’ language abilities. The mean length of utterance (MLU) is frequently used to measure children’s productive speech (Hsu, 2002). It reflects children’s gradually increasing nature of utterance length and continuous revision of the rules applied to generate grammatical structures. As children’s memory capacity and grammatical information increase, their MLU
expands (Ellis, 1985). Previous studies (Brown, 1973; Klee, 1992; Miller & Chapman, 1981) with English-speaking population indicated that MLU strongly correlated with language proficiency of preschoolers.
The calculation of MLU in English is usually counting the number of
morphemes and then it is divided by the total number of utterances. Nevertheless, the way that researchers adopt to calculate MLU in English may not be excellently applied to the calculation of MLU in Mandarin due to the fact that the morphological nature of English is different from that of Mandarin. Before elaborating on how to calculate MLU in Mandarin, the present study should clarify the difference among a character, a morpheme, and a word in Mandarin first. Li and Thompson (1981) provided an account of the relation among a character, a morpheme, and a word as follows. In Mandarin, each character is pronounced as a monosyllable and each word is composed of one or more characters. A word, as defined by Li and Thompson, is a unit typical of “syntactic and semantic independence and integrity” (p. 13). Most polysyllabic words in Mandarin consist of several morphemes but few of them consist of only one morpheme. Polysyllabic forms such as you2qi1 ‘paint’, pu2tao2 ‘grape’, and bo1li2 ‘glass’ constitute single words despite the fact that they consist of two characters. However, you2qi1 consists of two morphemes but pu2tao2 and bo1li2 consist of only one morpheme. If pu2tao2 is separated as two morphemes, each character has no meaning. In short, the rules used to calculate how many morphemes
constitute a word in Mandarin are not as clear as that in English.
For the calculation of MLU in Mandarin, MLUW (MLU in words) seems more appropriate than MLUM (MLU in morphemes). There are two reasons to support that MLUW is more appropriate than MLUM in calculating Mandarin-speaking EFL children’s MLU in both English and Mandarin. First, Liao (1994) investigated the validity of MLU as a developmental index of language production for young
Mandarin-speaking children. She suggested that MLUW was better than MLUM and MLUC (MLU in characters) because it highly correlated with the other two measures and conformed to the concept of morpheme. Thus, MLUW is better in measuring the language productivity of Mandarin-speaking population. Secondly, there are
considerable differences between the morphology of English and Mandarin. The rules applied to count how many morphemes constitute a word in Mandarin are not as clear as that in English. To provide an equivalent measure of language productivity in English and Mandarin, the number of words in each utterance is calculated instead of the number of morphemes. Therefore, MLUW should be adopted to measure
Mandarin-speaking EFL children’s language productivity in English and Mandarin. Nevertheless, the application of MLU has its limitation. MLU is useful at early stages of language development but its validity for English-speaking children beyond 3;6 or MLU score greater than 4 has been questioned (Craig, Washington, &
Thompson-Porter, 1998). MLU is also a valid predictor of Mandarin-speaking
children’s language development only when MLU score is below 4 or participants are preschool children (Cheung, 1998; Liao, 1994). Hence, the limitation of the
application of MLU is that the measure may only be valid for learners below 3;6. For older children, MLU may not be a valid language index. Researchers should be more conservative in interpreting the MLU value when either older participants or greater
MLU score is involved.
In order to avoid the limitation of the MLU measure, an utterance can be defined by a communication unit (C-unit; Loban, 1976) which consists of an independent clause plus its modifier or one main clause and all of its subordinate clauses. Instead of using pause, intonation, or semantic segmentation criteria to segment language samples into utterances, C-unit segmentation rules follow structural criteria to segment language samples. Craig et al. (1998) proposed that with older children, an utterance defined by a C-unit is usually used for oral language analysis. Still, Loban (as cited in Miller et al., 2006) noted that “devising an objective method for
segmenting the flow of oral language was a critical problem.” It becomes relatively difficult when researchers attempt to apply the same segmentation rules across two languages. In Miller et al.’s (2006) study with Spanish-speaking ESL children, Loban’s rationale for considering English utterances with compound predicates and the same subjects as one C-unit was modified because this rule was not applicable across languages, such as Spanish. Miller et al. treated coordinated utterances with co-referential subject deletion in the second clause as separate C-units. For example, the utterance “The frog saw the boy and (it) ran away” is composed of two C-units.
In the present study, Loban’s C-unit rules for segmenting utterances were
modified as well. According to Loban (1976), each C-unit consists of one main clause and all of its subordinate clauses. This rule is not applicable in Mandarin because different linguists have distinctive definition of what a coordinate, subordinate, or adverbial conjunction is. Some researchers such as Li and Thompson (1981) even applied the term “linking elements” instead of conjunctions to describe units used to connect clauses. Therefore, this rule was modified as follows: when two clauses are connected by the linking element, they are two modified C-units (e.g., The boy slept
and the frog went away.).
Loban’s rationale for considering English utterances with coordinated predicates and co-referential subject deletion in the second clause should be modified as well. In light of the nature of pro-drop in Mandarin, pronouns may be omitted when they are semantically inferable from the linguistic context. Hence, Mandarin speakers
frequently omit the co-referential subject in the second clause without a loss of meaning. The second modified C-unit rule is that when there is an utterance with linked clauses and a co-referential subject deletion in the second clause with a longer modifier, this utterance is composed of two modified C-units. For example, the utterance “A boy wakes up and sees no frog.” is treated as two modified C-units; however, “A boy wakes up and cries.” is considered consisting of one modified C-unit. The same modified C-unit rules were applied across both English and Mandarin in the present study to maintain consistency and comparability across both language
measures. To make an equivalent comparison of older children’s language
productivity in Mandarin and English, the mean length of modified C-unit in words (MLMCW) was used to measure the Taiwanese EFL children’s production in the present study. The following are two examples showing an utterance consisting of one modified C-unit in the first example and two modified C-units in the second example.
gou3 gan4dao4 Yi4 zhi1 Na4ge0 tuo1tao2 dog see-arrive one CL that shed-flee
The dog saw one which ran away. 狗看到一隻那個脫逃
dang1 ta1 xiao3de0 shi2hou4, mei2 ren2 zhao4gu4 ta1 when 3sg small time not person care:for 3sg
When s/he was small, there was no one to take care of him/ her. 當他小的時候，沒人照顧他
Studies with English-speaking monolingual children (e.g., Zackheim & Conture, 2003), Chinese-speaking monolingual children (e.g., Au, 2002; Chi, 2001; Tsou & Cheung, 2007), and Spanish-speaking ESL children (e.g., Miller et al., 2006) have measured children’s MLU to reflect their language productivity. Research with Chinese-speaking monolingual children (e.g., Au, 2002; Chi, 2001) and
Spanish-speaking ESL children (e.g., Fiestas & Pena, 2004) has tallied children’s average number of C-units to measure their story length. Some studies with Mandarin-speaking monolingual children (e.g., Chi, 2001; Lin, 2004) and Spanish-speaking ESL children (e.g., Fiestas & Pena, 2004) have calculated the number of total words (NTW) to reveal children’s language development. Other research with Mandarin-speaking monolingual children (e.g., Lin, 2004) and Spanish-speaking ESL children (Miller et al., 2006) has measured the number of different words (NDW) to tap into children’s vocabulary diversity. Language
productivity measures in the present study were calculated for NMC, MLMCW, NTW, and NDW.
For example, in Zackheim and Conture’s (2003) study, 12 English-speaking monolingual participants below the age of 6 years were recruited. The influence of utterance length and complexity pertinent to children’s mean length of utterance was examined. The results showed that utterances with length greater than children’s MLU were more vulnerable to disfluency. Tsou and Cheung (2007) used the wordless
picture book, Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969) as the elicitation tool to elicit children’s production. They investigated the content and linguistic expression of 19 high-functioning Taiwanese monolingual children with autism and a matched group of 19 children with normal development. Their average age was 5;9. The children’s MLUW, the total number of utterances, and NTW were measured. They formed that the high-functioning autistic group produced comparatively well on length of story and MLUW.
Chi’s (2001) study examined the language productivity of 66 third-grade and sixth-grade Taiwanese monolingual poor readers and 65 peers of the same grade in a storytelling context. The children’s MLUW, the total number of utterances, the total number of C-units, NTW, and NDW in Mandarin were measured. The results
indicated that there was no significant difference in the MLUW between poor readers and their typically-developing peers. Nonetheless, the NTW of the poor readers was lower than that of their peers. In Au’s (2002) study, 100 Cantonese-speaking
typically-developing children between 5 and 9 years old retold a story in Cantonese. A 14-page wordless picture book was used to illustrate the story. She examined the children’s mean length of C-unit in words (MLCW) and the average number of C-units. The results showed that MLCW had a positive correlation with age. Thus, MLCW can be used as a developmental index of language productivity for
school-aged children.
Fiestas and Pena (2004) examined Spanish-English ESL children’s language productivity in a storytelling context, using the wordless book, Frog, where are you? The children’s MLCW, the total number of C-units, and NTW were calculated. Although the children were exposed to a second language after acquiring their first language at home, the finding indicated that the children’s expectations about story
length and how much information to address in a specific narrative task in their two languages were interrelated. The above studies have measured monolingual Chinese- or English-speaking or Spanish-speaking ESL children’s language productivity in their oral narratives. However, relatively little research has been done on
Mandarin-speaking EFL children’s language productivity in their oral narratives across English and Mandarin, not to mention the measure of their mean length of utterances defined by modified C-units in words.
Linguistic Structures
Measures of linguistic structures have been considered as developmental indices for children’s language development. Measures of morphological errors and syntactic structures comprise measures of linguistic structures. Some studies (e.g., Chen, 2007; Chi, 2001; 2003; Fiestas & Pena, 2004; Reilly et al., 2004; Tsou & Cheung, 2007) have analyzed children’s oral narratives to investigate their morphological errors and syntactic structures and to reveal their language abilities. Morphological errors involve all errors of commission or omission (Reilly et al., 2004). For example, one child made a morphological error in the sentence: “The dog looks in the jar.” This is a commission of preposition error. The preposition “in” should be replaced by “into” because the dog looks into the jar to check if the frog is there. Syntactic structures refer to the various types of syntactic structures used. For instance, in the sentence with two linked clauses: “The boy is angry because the dog falls down,” the independent clause is “The boy is angry” and the dependent clause is “because the dog falls down.”
With the aim of obtaining insight into children’s morphological knowledge, Chi (2001) examined morphological knowledge of 66 third-grade and sixth-grade
