Intro -- Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- 1.1 Cantonese as a major Chinese dialect -- 1.2 Reasons for studying early childhood Cantonese -- 1.3 Research data and method -- 1.4 Organization of the book -- Chapter 2 Cantonese lexical development in the early years -- 2.1 Lexical categories in Cantonese -- 2.2 Early child lexical development: Repertoire, norms, and trends -- 2.3 Noun bias versus verb bias -- 2.4 Cantonese classifiers -- 2.5 Conclusion and implications -- Chapter 3 Syntactic development in the early years -- 3.1 Indicators of syntactic development -- 3.2 Syntactic development in the early years -- 3.3 Gender and age differences in syntactical development -- 3.4 Conclusion and implications -- Chapter 4 Interrogative development in the early years -- 4.1 Interrogative forms in early childhood Cantonese -- 4.2 Interrogative functions in early childhood Cantonese -- 4.3 Conclusion and implications -- Chapter 5 Cognitive development in the early years: The case of temporal words -- 5.1 Forms of early Cantonese temporal words -- 5.2 Development of early Cantonese temporal words -- 5.3 Discussion, conclusion, and implications -- Chapter 6 General conclusion and implications -- 6.1 General conclusions -- 6.2 General discussion -- 6.3 Limitations of the study -- 6.4 Implications -- Appendix I: Jyutping: The Cantonese Romanization System proposed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong -- Appendix II: Early vocabulary inventory for Cantonese Chinese -- References -- Index.

Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.