新加坡英汉双语儿童常用身体动词习得情况研究 = A study of the acquisition of commonly used physical action verbs by English-Chinese bilingual children in Singapore

Abstract

Bilingualism in early childhood is a widely-debated topic with several schools of thoughts. There are also varying responses regarding lexical acquisition in bilingual children. Grosjean (2010) defines bilinguals as “those who use two or more languages (or dialects) in their everyday lives.” This is an empirical study which aims to investigate the competencies in both English and Chinese of 5-to-7-year-old Singaporean children. The study also intends to examine the characteristics of verb acquisition by Singaporean bilingual children. An experiment was designed using 13 selected physical action verbs from Gao’s (2001) physical action verb list: Verbs of Direct Physical Contact. The experiment was conducted in 2 sessions, one in English and the other in Chinese. Pictures of different objects were shown to each of the children one by one and they were asked if they could use a certain verb X on the different stimuli. A total of 46 children who were English-Chinese bilinguals were recruited for the study and 36 children’s responses were valid and included in the analysis. The results of the study show that the children have a higher level of language competency in English as compared to that of Chinese. We also found that there were several factors which affected the children’s verb acquisition namely: age, internal and external factors, language interference, and visual interference. We hope that the findings of this study can serve as a basis for further studies related to the bilingual development in children in Singapore.

Keywords: Child language acquisition, English-Chinese bilinguals, Physical action verbs, lexical acquisition