What strategies do children use in acquiring their native language? This project will be the first study of how children acquire Vietnamese, a language with a rich and complex classifier system. Under the direction of Dr. Ann Peters, Ms. Jennie Tran will trace the early syntactic development of classifier phrases by collecting longitudinal data from three children from monolingual families in Vietnam. Ms. Tran will also collect semi-controlled naturalistic data from 6 pairs of children, and elicited-production data from 36 children in a daycare center in Vietnam, focusing on the syntactic and semantic aspects of the numeral classifier system. The study will identify alternate strategies that children use in acquiring classifiers to determine whether there are universal strategies that exist despite language-specific differences in the order of nominal elements.
The descriptive profile of the semantic development of Vietnamese classifiers will be a valuable source for cross-linguistic comparison. By providing insights into the difficulties children face, the errors they make, and the strategies they employ to acquire the classifier system, this project can help second language teachers of classifier languages develop more effective methods for teaching classifier systems to foreign learners. The project will contribute new child Vietnamese data (both naturalistic parent-child and child-child interactions) to the CHILDES data bank in electronic form so that it can be easily accessed, shared, and disseminated among language acquisition researchers.
