Input and acquisition of Mandarin classifiers by English-Mandarin bilingual children

Previous studies on acquisition of classifiers by Mandarin-speaking monolingual children report that in comprehension studies the children often correctly select referents on the basis of classifiers, but in production they often use "general" classifiers like ge "[Chinese character]" and zhi "[Chinese character]" instead of the correct and specific classifiers. This study reports two tests adopted from Ning & Gu 2013 on how successive English-Mandarin bilingual children comprehend and produce classifiers while they acquiring English at the same time. Five English-Mandarin bilingual children whose parents are native English speakers and nine monolingual Mandarin-speaking children from the same kindergarten in Xi'an China are recruited. Their input information is collected through questionnaires and recordings from parents, childcare givers and observational data. Both bilingual children and monolingual children participated in the elicited tasks for comprehension and production of Mandarin classifiers. The results show that the bilingual subject group, though with only half or even less exposure time in comparison to their monolingual peers, have achieved a similar pattern of classifier acquisition in comprehension and production. There are no qualitative differences between these two groups, although individual differences are found within these two groups. The findings on bilingual children's comprehension of Mandarin classifiers are consistent with the previous monolingual research. Bilingual children even perform better than monolingual peers in production for certain classifiers. It seems that limited input does not affect bilingual children's acquisition of Mandarin classifiers and their syntactic combinations