The effect of word position in children

1
The effect of word position in childrens
acquisitionof their first wordsEliza von
Baeyer and Elena NicoladisDepartment of
PsychologyUniversity of Alberta

• CODING
• The speech recorded on videotape was transcribed
  according to CHAT guidelines (MacWhinney, 1995).
• The videotapes taken in the Chinese context were
  transcribed by a native speaker of Chinese and
  those taken in the English context by a native
  speaker of English.
• Transcripts were coded for common nouns (e.g.,
  dog, ball) and verbs (any verb, including
  auxiliary verbs) in both the utterance initial
  and utterance final positions of childrens
  utterances

• INTRODUCTION
• Question do Chinese-English bilingual children
  find the initial or the final position of
  utterances salient in choosing their first words?
• Evidence
• The final position is salient in language
  acquisition in Chinese, Italian and English
  Tardif, Shatz, Naigles (1997), and Portugese
  (Nicoladis, 2001)
• The initial position is less important in
  language acquisition (Tardif et al., 1997)
• The Chinese language produces more verbs at the
  ends of utterances
• The English language produces more nouns at the
  ends of utterances and many of their first
• This study examined Chinese-English bilingual
  childrens language use.
• We reasoned that if the final position in the
  utterance were highly salient, then children
  should learn more verbs in Chinese and more nouns
  in English
• METHOD
• Four Mandarin Chinese-English bilingual children
• two boys and two girls, participated in this
  study.
• All children were growing up in Edmonton,
  Alberta, Canada, a city with a majority language
  of English and a small and active
  Chinese-speaking community
• At the time of the study, the childrens ages
  were as follows
• BB 17
• EH 19