Do Girls Outperform Boys in Early Syntactic Development? Negative Evidence from Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5901357
AutoresNga-Yui Tong, Hui Li (0000-0001-9355-1116, Shanghai Normal University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen7
Número4
Páginas281
Fecha de publicación2022-11-02
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLanguages (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
EditorialMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages7040281
OpenAlexW4308121364
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas19

This study aimed to verify the sex differences seen in our previous study on early syntactic development among Cantonese-speaking children with the same corpus design but a different Chinese language: Mandarin. The utterances produced during half-hour play activities by 192 Beijing children, ranging from 3 to 6 years, were collected in the Early Child Mandarin Corpus and analyzed in this study. Their syntactic development was measured in terms of mean length of utterance (MLU), sentence type and structure, syntactic complexity, and verb pattern. The statistical analyses indicated significant age differences in MLU, sentence types and structures, and syntactic complexity. However, no sex or age-by-sex differences in MLU were found. This negative evidence indicates that sex difference is neither universal nor cross-language. The implications for early childhood education and future studies are discussed

Beijing · China · Developmental psychology · Language development · Linguistics · Mandarin Chinese · Mean length of utterance · Sentence · Syntax · Utterance · Verb · Child and Animal Learning Development · History · Language Development and Disorders · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development