華語嬰幼兒表達性詞彙的語意內容及詞類組成之發展

Abstract

嬰幼兒早期詞彙發展大致上遵循著一個共通的發展順序，但仍會受到先天生物因素以及後天環境因素的影響，產生個體在速度、順序、風格等方面發展上的變異性。本研究以一項具國內大規模常模施測的嬰幼兒語言溝通發展資料為基礎，分析1897 名華語16-36 個月大嬰幼兒表達性詞彙在「語意內容」和「語法詞類組成」發展上的變化，以提供語言早期發展趨勢的實徵資料，並檢驗相關的理論。研究結果顯示，華語嬰幼兒早期表達性詞彙的發展與其他語言背景的幼兒呈現相同的趨勢。華語幼兒的前50 個表達性詞彙語意內容，以符合兒童日常生活情境使用的名詞為主。有關詞類的組成，普通名詞在各詞彙量的發展階段所佔的比例皆最高。不同的詞類呈現不同的發展趨勢，普通名詞與動詞、修飾語詞同樣在早期表達性詞彙發展階段呈現出快速增加的現象，但封閉詞組則是在幼兒詞彙發展的過程中呈現緩慢而持續的成長。除了理論上的探討之外，本研究所提供個別詞彙發展順序的資料，也可作為兒童語言介入設計詞彙教學課程重要的參考依據。

Most evidence concerning the development of early expressive lexicons has demonstrated that both intrinsic and environmental factors play important roles on the individual variations in the developmental patterns. One of the environmental factors is the variation in the language systems. The purpose of this study is to investigate the developmental changes in the semantic content and composition of early expressive vocabulary in Mandarin-speaking infants and toddlers. Parent report data (N = 1897) was collected using the Mandarin-Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI), and the results showed that the trend in the development of early expressive lexicons in Mandarin-speaking infants and toddlers were similar to those with other language backgrounds. The semantic content of the early expressive vocabulary wasmostly related to the toddlers’ daily life, and the major grammatical category was nouns. Different developmental trends were found for different categories: nouns, verbs, and adjectives grew rapidly in the early stage while closed-class words showed a slow and continuous growth across the development of expressive vocabulary. In addition to the theoretical aspect, the detailed list of the age of acquisition for individual items provided in this study could be used to examine vocabulary development in children with language disorders and to design intervention programs in clinical settings.