Content-Form Interaction in the Acquisition of Temporal Markers by Mandarin-Speaking Children

Aspect markers (AMs), temporal adverbs (TAs) and temporal nouns (TNs) are used by young Mandarin-speaking children to express time. However, the factors that affect the relative acquisition trajectories of these categories remains unclear. Accordingly, this study adopts Weist's time-concept model to examine the patterns of acquisition between and within the above three categories of temporal markers in the Mandarin system of time. Specifically, temporal markers were extracted from language samples obtained from 82 Mandarin-speaking children aged 2 to 5 years, who were divided into three groups by age. The results indicated that the token counts and the type counts of temporal markers were significantly higher among the older children, who were also more capable of using more categories of temporal markers, and were more likely to use multiple markers in single utterances. Of the three categories of temporal marker, AMs emerged earliest, and the participants' repertoires of AMs stopped expanding sooner than their TA and TN repertoires did. As measured by token use, AMs were mastered earliest. Within each of the three categories, the acquisition of temporal-marker subgroups also varied according to two semantic features: temporal remoteness and specificity. The findings were consistent with Weist's principles, and suggest that language-general time concepts (content) and language-specific syntactic properties (form) interact to shape the acquisition of temporal markers by Mandarin-speaking children, with the additional role being played by the semantic features of temporal remoteness and specificity within each category. Theoretical and clinical implications are also discussed. This study investigated Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of three types of linguistic terms, namely, aspect markers, temporal adverbs, and temporal nouns, to express temporal ideas. The factors that affected their acquisition were also explored. Temporal expressions were extracted from natural language samples obtained from 82 Mandarin-speaking children aged two to five. The older children used more varieties of temporal terms in general, and they were more capable of using multiple temporal terms in single utterances. Moreover, temporal terms expressing more remote and specific time concepts were acquired later than those expressing proximate and generic time concepts. It was found that language content (measured as abstractness of meanings) and language form (measured as linguistic complexity) interacted to shape the acquisition of various temporal terms. Moreover, the acquisition of different linguistic terms to express temporal ideas was affected by the children's progress in the acquisition of more advanced time concepts. These findings provided enhanced evidence of the acquisition patterns of temporal terms by young children. A two-dimensional content-form interactive framework of language acquisition was further proposed, which can be applied to predict the acquisition patterns of other linguistic terms in the language assessment of typically developing children as well as those with language disorders. The relatively small group size and reliance on natural language samples instead of structural contexts in the current study potentially limit the findings. Future studies should recruit a wider age range of participants and use both natural and structural language elicitation procedures to replicate the findings.