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Tracing the Emergence of Classifier Use in Mandarin-Speaking Children: Insights from Longitudinal Naturalistic Data

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Shan An¹ (); ¹Teachers college

Mandarin Chinese provides a revealing case for studying early language development as a classifier language, where a classifier must appear between a numeral or determiner and the quantified noun. Classifiers encode rich semantic features such as animacy, shape, and material, yet the mappings between classifiers and nouns are often opaque, even for adult speakers. How young children discover these form–meaning correspondences offers a window into the development of linguistic and conceptual organization. Previous research has largely examined older children (above age four) in experimental settings, leaving the early emergence of classifier use underexplored. The present study analyzed longitudinal naturalistic data from 16 Mandarin-speaking children (ages 1;4–5;4) available on CHILDES. Results show that children first produce the general classifier gè and extend its use to contexts where specific classifiers (e.g., liàng for vehicles) would be expected. Over time, they expand to classifiers denoting animate, shape-based, and collective categories (e.g., zhī, tiáo, zhāng, shuāng). Moreover, children initially employ determiner–classifier combinations (e.g., zhè gè, “this [CL]”) before numeral–classifier constructions and tend to omit the noun in the former but not in the latter. These findings support both the Semantic Feature Hypothesis and the Functional Core Hypothesis, suggesting that early classifier use reflects the interaction between perception and the bounding contexts children are exposed to.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging