Investigation of parents' choice of topic-comment sentence construction during parent-child talk using narratives collected from the talk together study

• Main Author: Ng, Sing Xuan
• Other Authors: Suzy Styles
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences; Translanguaging; Topic-comment structure; Subject-predicate structure; Information structure; Bilingualism; Parent-child interaction
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/175652
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Different languages have different grammatical rules and sentence structures used to organise information in sentences (Laleko, 2022; Matić, 2015). Singapore speakers frequently translanguage, where they fluidly use linguistics resources from various languages including Mandarin and Malay without separating the languages (Otheguy et al., 2015). Mandarin-English bilinguals may use two types of sentence syntax to organise information in a sentence – subject-predicate constructions dominant in English and topic-comment constructions dominant in Mandarin (Li & Thompson, 1976; Shi, 2000). It is also known that parents frequently translanguage to facilitate their child’s multilingual language development (Kim & Song, 2019; Purohit & Rahman, 2021). Thus, this study is interested in how parents translanguage and vary their use of the topic-comment constructions and subject-predicate constructions when interacting with their children. Using a corpus of parent-child talks collected from the Talk Together Study (Woon et al., 2021a), three potential factors affecting parents’ use of topic-comment constructions are investigated: (1) the child’s age, (2) the parent’s relative Mandarin proficiency compared to English, and (3) the parent’s educational level. Findings revealed that Mandarin-English bilingual parents with greater relative Mandarin proficiency compared to English use a greater proportion of topic-comment constructions in parent-child talk, and this relationship still stands after accounting for the proportion of Mandarin utterances in the interaction. Thus, a child raised in Singapore’s bilingual environment is exposed to different ways of representing information in a sentence. These findings provide a foundation for relevant translanguaging research in this area, particularly those looking at the use of the different syntactic structures across languages and the representation of information structure.