Comparative Study On Mandarin-speaking And English-speaking Children's Early Acquisition Of Color Words

Nearly one hundred years'study on color words shows that studies on color words are full of arguments between the theory of language relativity and the theory of language evolution. In 1969, Berlin and Kay proposed the evolutionary theory of Basic Color Words. After about 40 years'development, the evolutionary view which is supported by the Theory of Basic Color Terms becomes the mainstream in the research of color words. An interesting phenomenon is that the developing process of the Theory of Basic Color Terms is not fully affirmed in children's language acquisition of color words. So this thesis tries to investigate whether Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking children's acquisition order of color words follows the evolutionary order of Basic Color Terms.This thesis adopts observational method and experimental method to collect data and analyze them by mathematical statistics. It aims to study on Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking children's early development of color words and examine whether their developing order follows Berlin's evolutionary order of basic color terms. The thesis consists of four chapters besides the introduction and the conclusion.Chapter One presents the current research situations on children's color words at home and abroad and introduces the acquisition criteria of color words. Chapter Two are case studies on children's early development of color words. Based on the data of our group and the Brown corpus, it studies the characteristics of two Mandarin-speaking and two English-speaking children's early development of color words. Chapter Three is an experimental study on Mandarin-speaking children's color naming. Selection of the subjects is made from 151 children aged from three to six in a kindergarten in Loudi City, Hunan Province. It studies the characteristics of their early development of color words. Chapter Four makes a comparative analysis between Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking children's early development of color words. It examines whether the developing order of children's color words follows Berlin's evolutionary order.By analyzing the data of the case studies and the experimental study, this study obtains the following findings: (1) The development of children's color words does not necessarily follow Berlin(1969)'s evolutionary order; it is constrained by chance rather than by rules; (2) Children's color naming ability grows with their age; (3) Intermediate color words are not necessarily acquired later than monochrome color words; (4) Children's color naming ability has been improved with the times. Children nowadays acquire color words earlier than the time that the past research results stated; children nowadays acquire more knowledge about color words than children in the past at the same age.There are individual differences in children's early developing order of color words. Children's acquisition of color words has a close relationship not only with children's language development, but also with the development of children's mind, such as their abstract epitome ability. Children's early development of color words is influenced by language input, social living environment, early educational condition, culture, gender and so on.