%0 Journal Article
%T Syntactic cues to the noun and verb distinction in Mandarin child
%A Joanne Lee
%A Kathy Hirsh-Pasek
%A Peng Zhou
%A Roberta Michnick Golinkoff
%A Weiyi Ma
%J First Language
%@ 1740-2344
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0142723719845175
%X The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word¡¯s form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner (a/an/the), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in identifying a word¡¯s form class and thus glean some information about its meaning. This study examined whether Mandarin, a language that has a relatively impoverished morphosyntactic system, offers reliable morphosyntactic cues to the noun¨Cverb distinction in child-directed speech (CDS). Using the CHILDES Beijing corpora, Study 1 found that Mandarin CDS has reliable morphosyntactic markers to the noun¨Cverb distinction. Study 2 examined the relationship between mothers¡¯ use of a set of early-acquired nouns and verbs in the Beijing corpora and the age of acquisition (AoA) of these words. Results showed that the occurrence of the form class markers is a reliable predictor of the AoA for the early-acquired nouns and verbs
%K Age of acquisition
%K form class
%K Mandarin
%K nouns
%K syntactic bootstrapping
%K verbs
%K word learning
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0142723719845175