新加坡华族移民家庭学前儿童汉语语言习得个案分析 = A case study on a Chinese immigrant pre-school child’s language acquisition in Singapore

Abstract

学前儿童语言习得是语言研究领域所关注的一个问题。与此同时，移民是 当今许多国家的一个普遍现象，新加坡就是一个典型的例子。作为一个多元种 族的国家，新加坡有许多来自不同国家的移民，使之成为一个多语多文化社 会。尽管许多移民儿童出生于这样的社会环境中，还是缺乏了对于移民儿童的语言习得的研究。本研究旨在探讨新加坡移民的下一代子女的语言习得情况。 本研究主要以一位 2 岁 9 个月的新加坡华族儿童为研究对象，对其进行为期半年的跟踪观察，每天观察被试者在自然环境下的语言产量情况，最后总共得到 16 个小时的录音录像。通过对语料的转录方式建立一个小型语料库。每次录音 或者录影后都采用 CHILD (Child Language Data Exchange System) 中的 CLAN 软件进行语料分析。通过语料分析，我们能够研究儿童的华语和英语产量，并且了解儿童如何同时学习两种语言。该实验还包含了问卷调查，主要用于了解 儿童的语言背景和家庭状况，目的是研究儿童语言习得的可能影响因素。Pre-school children's language acquisition has been a concern in the field of linguistic study. Meanwhile, immigration is a common phenomenon nowadays in many countries such as in Singapore. As a multi-racial country, Singapore has many immigrants from other countries, which has turned Singapore into a multilingual and multicultural society. Although many immigrant children are born in such an environment, there is a lack of study on language acquisition of immigrants’ children. This research aims to investigate the language acquisition of Singapore immigrants' second generation. Our research is based on a Singapore Chinese child aged 2;9, we did a six-month observation of the child's language production on a daily basis naturally and did audio- and video-recording for a total of 16 hours. A small corpus was built up with the data transcribed from the recordings. Each recording was transcribed using CHILD (Child Language Data Exchange System) programme named CLAN for data analysis. By analysing the corpus data, we are able to study the child's Chinese as well as English productions and understand how a child learns two languages at the same time. Our experiment also included a questionnaire which includes the language background and family status. All these questions aimed to find out the factors that may influence the child's language acquisition.