“个”在英汉双语儿童中的泛化:语言输入的影响

Bilingual Children's Overgeneralisation of the Classifier ge in Chinese:What is the Role of Caretakers' Input?

本研究探讨英汉双语儿童和汉语单语儿童对汉语通用分类词"个"的习得和使用,以及成人语言输入在其中的作用。虽然汉语中很多名词可以和通用分类词"个"搭配,仍然有一些名词只能接受具体分类词。以往研究发现,汉语儿童即使到了五、六岁还仍然会出现对"个"的过度使用。这种"不恰当"的使用被解释为"泛化"现象,反映了儿童基于规则的语言习得机制。然而,以往研究多采取的是诱导儿童对物体或图画数数的实验方法使得儿童产出分类词,并未研究语言输入对其产生的影响。缺乏对语言输入的分析,仅仅把"个"的泛化归咎于基于规则的语言习得机制,证据仍显不足。本文系统分析了在中国一所幼儿园收集到的历时4个月的语料库中5名教师、7名英汉双语儿童和12名汉语单语儿童的"个"的产出语句。结果发现,双语儿童和单语儿童对"个"的使用模式相似;同时,教师出现类似儿童对"个"的过度使用,很明显对儿童的"个"的过度使用产生了影响。然而,幼儿在某些结构中远远高于老师对"个"的过度使用也体现了儿童对规则的泛化。因此,语言输入和幼儿对规则的习得机制在语言习得中共同发挥着作用。

Children's acquisition of specific classifiers in classifier languages(such as Chinese) has received much scholarly attention. In this study, preschool children's overuse of the general classifier ge in Mandarin is investigated in order to find out the influence of caretakers' input on young learners' choice of classifiers. In Chinese, the general classifier ge can be used for a variety of head nouns, yet there are some nouns which grammatically require other specific classifiers. Previous studies showed that children's' overgeneralisation' of ge in Mandarin reflects a rule-based learning mechanism. Methodologically, the elicitation counting in previous studies ignored the authentic input from caregivers, so it is unclear whether children's overuse of ge is simply a case of overgeneralisation in acquisition or an outcome caused by other factors such as caretakers' input. In this study, a corpus of teachers' and children's natural conversations are used to analyse the patterns of ge in caretakers' productions in relation to children's uses of the classifier. The corpus includes Mandarin transcripts of weekly recordings of teachers and children in a childcare centre in China, and the participants involved are five teachers, seven English-Mandarin bilingual children and twelve Mandarin monolingual children.The results show that bilingual and monolingual children show similar patterns of overuse of ge, and both teachers and children extend the use of ge for nouns which require specific classifiers, though the rate of teachers' overuse is significantly lower than that of children. The results suggest that children's overuse of ge is influenced by caretakers' input as well as rule-based learning. Thus, we propose that the caretakers' input and children's rule-based mechanism are two contributing factors for the generalized use of ge for young learners in China.