Friedrich-Schiller-UniversitätJena, Germany.
J Child Lang. 2023 Jul;50(4):922-953. doi: 10.1017/S030500092200023X. Epub 2022 May 11.
This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., ) from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates the emergence and development of demonstratives in three European (English, French, Spanish) and four non-European languages (Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian) between age 1;0 and 6;0. The data show that, across languages, demonstratives are among the earliest and most frequent child words, but their frequency decreases with age and MLU. As children grow older, they tend to use other types of referring terms (e.g., anaphoric pronouns) and other types of spatial expressions (e.g., adpositions). Considering these results, we hypothesize that children shift from using a body-oriented strategy of deictic communication to more abstract and disembodied strategies of encoding reference and space during the preschool years.
本文从跨语言的角度考察了指示词（如）的习得。尽管指示词通常被认为在母语习得中起着至关重要的作用，但针对这一主题的系统研究却很少。本研究使用大量自发儿童言语语料库，调查了英语、法语、西班牙语这三种欧洲语言和日语、汉语、希伯来语、印度尼西亚语这四种非欧洲语言中指示词在 1 岁 0 个月至 6 岁 0 个月期间的出现和发展情况。研究数据表明，在所有语言中，指示词都是儿童最早且最常使用的词汇之一，但随着年龄的增长和语言复杂度的增加，其使用频率逐渐降低。随着儿童年龄的增长，他们往往会使用其他类型的指代词（如回指代词）和其他类型的空间表达（如介词）。鉴于这些结果，我们假设儿童在学前阶段从使用基于身体的指示交际策略逐渐转变为更抽象和非身体化的编码参照和空间的策略。
