Early Language Acquisition of Mandarin-Speaking Children

"Compared with other subdisciplines in Chinese Linguistics, children's language acquisition is a significant field with relatively limited achievements. Based on data from a dynamic and developmental corpus, this book is a comprehensive exploration of the early development of Chinese-speaking children's language acquisition. Anchoring the discussions regarding phonetics, semantics, and aspects of syntax in a cognitive and functional framework, the author conducts an in-depth analysis of many acquisition characteristics, such as: the inevitable and incidental errors of their learning of initials; their ability to obtain the concept of time at a young age, and the utilization of Le in the expression of the past tense; their understanding of subjectivity at a young age and the ability to express it; children learn the degree of modality following the order of from probability to necessity; children's acquisition of syntactic structures is more impacted by genetics, and is also affected by the steps involved in syntactic processing. Although genetics, cognition, and experience all play a role in children's language acquisition, this book focuses on the role of cognitive functions. By successfully explaining the acquisition rules based on some cutting-edge linguistic theories, the book will certainly be beneficial to scholars studying linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and early childhood educators"--