Han, Mengru; Gu, Yan; (2023) Che-che (‘car-car’) and chi-chi (‘eat-eat’): Reduplication in Mandarin Chinese child-directed speech. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. pp. 920-927). Cognitive Science Society: Seattle, WA, USA.

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Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated that reduplication facilitates children’s word segmentation and learning. Although reduplication is often considered a feature of child-directed speech (CDS), it remains unclear if it is indeed more frequent in CDS than in adult-directed speech (ADS). This study examines the production and perception of reduplication in the context of language acquisition by focusing on Chinese, which has a rich system of reduplication. We analyze the frequency of reduplicated types and tokens as a function of speech register (ADS/CDS) and children’s age (18m/24m) in a corpus. Additionally, we conduct a survey to examine adults' perception of reduplications and determine their degree of child-directedness. Results indicate that there are more reduplicated types in CDS than in ADS. However, only the reduplicated tokens that are rated to be child-directed-specific occur more in CDS than in ADS. These findings provide insight into the nature of lexical input in language acquisition.

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