Association of nouns and classifiers by bilingual children in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Author: Gao, Helena Hong
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Bilingual Children; Chinese Language Acquisition
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/87643; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/45458; https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Association-of-Nouns-and-Classifiers-by-Bilingual-Gao/a0d40fa8cd73b2187ee17ecf55d3edf5469a997f
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This study examines 7-to-12-year-old Singaporean bilingual children’s use of noun classifiers in Mandarin Chinese and their reasoning while making the associations between nouns and classifiers as a given task. The results show that the children made the association by applying their cognitive understanding of the properties and functions of the noun objects, comparing between them, as well as following self-generated or learned rules. To investigate other factors that may affect the children’s learning, the children and their parents were given the task to make another 120 classifier phrases separately based on the list of the noun objects given. The results show that schooling, parents’ language proficiency, father’s age, mother’s academic attainment, and family income had correlations with the children’s result of this task-based language performance.