Poster #109 - English Questions Versus Chinese Questions: A Corpus-based Study of English-Chinese Bilingual Preschoolers in Singapore

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

The ability to ask question is critical to early cognitive and language development (Chouinard, 2007). The existing studies on early interrogative development have focused on monolingual children in either English (See Chouinard, 2007) or Chinese (Li, et al., 2013, 2015, 2017) language contexts. These findings are neither comparable nor consistent with each other, thus failing to provide a cross-linguistic pattern of early interrogative development. Singapore is a multilingual society in which Chinese preschoolers need to learn English as the first language and Chinese the second. It provides an ideal arena for this cross-linguistic comparison. Therefore, this study elicited and analyzed all the English and Chinese interrogatives produced in the Singapore Early Child Chinese-English Corpus (Li & Tse, 2011) to understand their commonalities and differences. In particular, the following questions guided this study: (1) what are the developmental trends of Chinese interrogatives? (2) what are the developmental trends of English interrogatives? (3) Chinese versus English interrogatives, which is more frequently used in Singapore preschoolers’ daily communication?

The corpus collected the natural utterances of 194 bilingual Singaporean preschoolers (aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6), who were randomly sampled from ten local preschools. They were randomly paired and invited to do a 30-minute free play in a comfortable play corner. Their conversations were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. All the Chinese and English interrogatives were elicited and coded with the similar coding system developed and tested in previous studies with children from similar multilingual societies (Li et al., 2015, 2017).

The results indicated that: First, the Singapore preschoolers produced 6 types of Chinese interrogatives (Table 1), with ‘wh-question’, ‘intonation/echo question’, and ‘yes/no question’ being the three most frequently used forms, while ‘rhetorical question’, ‘alternative question’ and ‘multiple question’ were barely used. Meanwhile, they produced 7 types of English interrogatives, sharing the same most frequently used interrogative forms with Chinese ones, whereas ‘rhetorical question’, ‘tag question’, ‘choice question’ were rarely or even not found in the corpus. Second, the children produced significantly more English ‘wh-question’ and ‘yes/no question’ than those in Chinese. Third, as shown in Figure 1, English interrogatives experienced a more rapid development than Chinese ones, as children get older, they produced more English interrogatives. Further analysis on the ratio of Chinese to English interrogatives produced by the 56 bilingual children found that they produced significantly more Chinese questions than English questions at age of 2.5 years, equal amount of Chinese and English interrogatives at the age of 3.5 years, but significantly less Chinese questions than English questions at the age of 4.5 years.

The results indicated that the Chinese preschoolers in Singapore acquired English interrogatives more and faster than that of Chinese interrogatives. This finding implies that the Chinese preschoolers might have difficulties to maintain the advantages of their mother tongue language in a multilingual society like Singapore, where the educational language policy and practices highly value and extremely favor English.

Authors

• Luyao Liang, Macquarie University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mengguo Jing, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Dandan Wu, Macquarie University
  Presenting Author

• Hui Li, Macquarie University
  Non-Presenting Author