Doctoral Dissertation Research: Children's Acquisition of Classifier Phrases and Numeral Classifiers in Vietnamese

孩子们在学习母语时使用什么策略？这个项目将是第一个研究儿童如何习得越南语的项目，越南语是一种具有丰富而复杂的分类系统的语言。在Ann Peters博士的指导下，jenny Tran女士将通过收集来自越南单语家庭的三个孩子的纵向数据来追踪分类器短语的早期句法发展。Tran女士还将从6对儿童身上收集半受控的自然主义数据，并从越南一家日托中心的36名儿童身上收集诱导生产数据，重点关注数字分类器系统的句法和语义方面。本研究将确定儿童在习得分类词时使用的替代策略，以确定是否存在通用策略，尽管在名义要素的顺序上存在特定的语言差异。越南语分类词语义发展的描述概况将为跨语言比较提供有价值的资料。通过深入了解儿童所面临的困难、所犯的错误以及他们在习得分类器系统时所采用的策略，本项目可以帮助分类器语言的第二语言教师开发出更有效的方法来向外国学习者教授分类器系统。该项目将以电子形式向CHILDES数据库提供新的越南儿童数据（包括自然的亲子互动和儿童之间的互动），以便在语言习得研究人员之间轻松访问、共享和传播。

What strategies do children use in acquiring their native language? This project will be the first study of how children acquire Vietnamese, a language with a rich and complex classifier system. Under the direction of Dr. Ann Peters, Ms. Jennie Tran will trace the early syntactic development of classifier phrases by collecting longitudinal data from three children from monolingual families in Vietnam. Ms. Tran will also collect semi-controlled naturalistic data from 6 pairs of children, and elicited-production data from 36 children in a daycare center in Vietnam, focusing on the syntactic and semantic aspects of the numeral classifier system. The study will identify alternate strategies that children use in acquiring classifiers to determine whether there are universal strategies that exist despite language-specific differences in the order of nominal elements.The descriptive profile of the semantic development of Vietnamese classifiers will be a valuable source for cross-linguistic comparison. By providing insights into the difficulties children face, the errors they make, and the strategies they employ to acquire the classifier system, this project can help second language teachers of classifier languages develop more effective methods for teaching classifier systems to foreign learners. The project will contribute new child Vietnamese data (both naturalistic parent-child and child-child interactions) to the CHILDES data bank in electronic form so that it can be easily accessed, shared, and disseminated among language acquisition researchers.