title: The acquisition of Cantonese classifiers by preschool children in Hong Kong.
abstract: The Cantonese language has a complex classifier system and young learners need to pay attention to both the semantics and syntax of classifiers. This study investigated the repertoire of classifiers produced by 492 Cantonese-speaking preschoolers in three age groups (3;0, 4;0 and 5;0). Spontaneous utterances produced in 30-minute toy-play contexts were collected and transcribed. Analyses identified a productive repertoire of 73 classifiers in the utterances, which could be appropriately classified into the typology proposed in the present study. An age-related increase in the number of classifier types per child as well as the repertoire size of each group was found. [symbol: see text] go3 (CL) was widely used as the general classifier by the young children. It was also discovered that the three-year-olds were already showing signs of grasping the basic syntax of classifiers. Cognitive, linguistic and contextual influences presumed to shape the evidence are discussed.
authors.affiliation: The University of Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Shek Kam
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Tse
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Shing On
authors.initials: SO
authors.lastname: Leung
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006723:Hong Kong; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary