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Development of Cantonese nominal structure in a bilingual child: Some preliminary findings
Author(s)
Date Issued
2019
Publisher
Open University of Hong Kong
ISBN
9789888439607
Citation
Yang, Y. (2019). Development of Cantonese nominal structure in a bilingual child: Some preliminary findings. In OUHK (Ed.). 2018 International conference on bilingual learning and teaching e-proceedings. 2018 International Conference on Bilingual Learning and Teaching, Hong Kong ( pp.109-115). The Open University of Hong Kong.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Research on child bilingualism has focused extensively on children speaking Indo-European
languages, which share typological similarities within language pairs. It is thus proposed that
investigating language pairs that are more typologically distant (e.g., English and Chinese
languages) would bring more insights into the literature. In the very few studies on bilingualism
involving Chinese languages, however, conflicting results have been found. Some studies
reveal comparable performance in bilingual and monolingual children, while others suggest
divergence between them and produce solid evidence of transfer of the two languages studied.
This study attempts to investigate how nominal structure is developed in the early Cantonese of
a Cantonese-English bilingual child, and whether there are differences between the acquisition
sequences of Cantonese nominal structure in bilingual and monolingual children. Our data were
obtained from a longitudinal corpus via the Child Language Data Exchange System
(CHILDES) archive. The child’s spontaneous utterances containing nominal structure were
extracted for further analyses. Our preliminary findings show that the developmental sequences of
the bilingual child were similar to that of the monolingual child. Bare nouns and pronouns were
among the first to emerge, and wh-words, numerals and the possessive marker were among the
latest to emerge. However, the bilingual child’s rate of acquisition seems to differ from that of
the monolingual child. Data from more children collected over a longer period of recording
sessions are needed to confirm our initial observations about the sequence and rate of
nominal acquisition by this bilingual child.
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