Toward an Index of Productive Syntax in Mandarin

華語表達語法指標之建立

10.6143/JSLHAT.202106_(44).0002

郭怡君(Jenny Yichun Kuo)；林奐伊(Huan-yi Lin)

Syntactic development ； Index of Productive Syntax ； Mandarin ； 語法發展 ； 表達發展指標 ； 華語

台灣聽力語言學會雜誌

44期（2021 / 06 / 01）

33 - 61

英文

Research on child language syntax has attempted to measure the overall syntactic development of language such as mean length of utterance (MLU) (Brown, 1973) and Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) (Scarborough, 1990) in English. MLU has been applied in Chinese with MLU syllable (MLUs) or MLU word (MLUw) (Cheung, 1998) with an age limitation, and there is a syntax comprehension test for elementary school students (Y.-h. Chang & Su, 2016). However, a measure for Chinese productive syntactic varieties is not yet available. Thus, this paper aims to develop a Mandarin Chinese version of IPSyn to evaluate the production of syntactic structures of Mandarin-speaking children or learners of Chinese as a second language. The IPSyn in Mandarin was applied to 31 language samples of Mandarin children aged from 2;11 (stands for two years and eleven months) to 6;5 from Chinese Chang corpus (C.-j. Chang, 1998) in the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database and Kuo corpus (Kuo, 2008, 2016). The scores were computed to test reliability and validity of the IPSyn in Mandarin. The results of this study showed that the IPSyn is a stable and potential valid measurement tool with sufficient language samples, at least 100 utterances.

在兒童語法研究中，許多研究利用語言實驗或語言發展評量，如平均語句長度（Brown, 1973）及語法發展指標（Scarborough, 1990），來觀察兒童的語言發展。平均語句長度已被應用於華語（Cheung, 1998），也有針對國小學童的句型理解測驗（Y.-h. Chang & Su, 2016）。然而，測量華語兒童的表達語法發展指標則尚未建立。因此，本文旨在建立華語表達語法發展指標，不僅可用來測量以華語為母語的兒童，也可用來測量以華語為第二語學習者的華語表達語法的發展。本研究所採用的語料是來自兒童語料交換系統（Child Language Data Exchange System[CHILDES] database）的張語料庫（C.-j. Chang, 1998）以及7份Kuo（2008, 2016）的語料。張語料庫有24位三至六歲華語兒童之跨齡語料，加上Kuo有7位二至五歲華語兒童之語料，共有31份華語語料。這些語料都是兒童與媽媽（或研究者）在說故事或玩積木時的對話所收集而成。每份語料按照語法發展指標之標準去計算每個句型的出現次數而得出一個總分，再來測驗華語語法發展指標的信效度。各分析結果顯示，華語表達語法指標是具有信度及效度的語言測量工具。另外，我們發現語句數的多寡會影響語法指標的表現，因此，建議測量華語學習者語法發展應用在至少有100句的語料上。

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