Development of Pragmatic and Discourse Skills in Chinese-Speaking Children: (60 Benjamins Current Topics)

For many years, studies of the development of pragmatic and discourse skills in young children have predominantly focused on English and other European languages, as with the field of child language development in general. This volume, originally published in Chinese Language and Discourse 3:1 (2012), brings together a team of researchers from China, the UK, USA, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. It explores the development of pragmatic and discourse skills among Chinese-speaking children by investigating the development of pragmatic features specific to the Chinese language and culture (i.e. the use of null forms and overt forms in self/other reference and time expressions), socio-cultural factors in child-directed speech and comprehension of semiotic resources in children’s early childhood. The studies reported in the volume draw upon data of different kinds including recorded spontaneous speech, corpus, questionnaires and experimental data. The findings not only highlight a number of developmental patterns which may be attributed to the Chinese language(s) and culture, but also contribute to the understanding of some key issues in the development of pragmatic and discourse skills irrespective of linguistic backgrounds.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction; 2. Development of pragmatic and discourse skills in Chinese-speaking children (by Hua, Zhu); 3. Articles; 4. The pragmatic function of self/other reference in Mandarin child language (by Huang, Chiung-chih); 5. Tense and temporality: How young children express time in Cantonese (by Tse, Shek Kam); 6. Maternal affective input in mother-child interaction: A cross-cultural perspective (by Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo); 7. Do educational backgrounds make a difference?: A comparative study on communicative acts of Chinese mothers in interacting with their young children (by Zhou, Jing); 8. Chinese preschool children's comprehension of a picture storybook (by Li, Linhui); 9. About the authors; 10. Index

Review :
This book is a welcome contribution to the growing body of knowledge on the acquisition of Chinese, and to the crosslinguistic study of language development. In its concentration on pragmatic and discourse skills it breaks new ground, and will inevitably stimulate further research into these important areas. This is one of the few special collections that are available on discourse pragmatic approaches to Chinese child language development. As such it constitutes an indispensable reading for researchers in both the fields of Chinese child language and language acquisition in general. This book is undoubtedly a major contribution to the field in the study of the Chinese-speaking children’s acquisition of pragmatic and discourse skills and will be a catalyst for further research.