The acquisition of Thai classifiers in bilingual children : a longitudinal study

This project will focus on an acquisition of the Thai classifiers in a simultaneous bilingual Thai child living in the UK, whose age is approximately three years old. This child will be observed for a whole year to see her development in acquiring Thai numeral classifiers, and see whether bilingualism does affect her learning of the Thai classifier system. A comparison will be made with two control subjects, one is a three-year old monolingual Thai child and the other is an English-Thai bilingual child who lives in Thailand, in order to determine to what extent the degree of exposure to Thai affects the process of classifier acquisition in the bilinguals.

Findings from the research confirm that the sequence of the classifier acquisition between the monolingual subject and the bilingual subjects are generally the same. The frequency of input bears a significant role in the speed of the classifier
acquisition as the bilingual subject (TH), who apparently receives more Thai language input than his counterpart, shows relatively more development than the bilingual subject (UK) from the start. The finding supports Gathercole (2002a,b) regarding the importance of the frequency of input in language acquisition of bilingual children.

The data obtained from this research also demonstrate that young children use perceptual properties, especially shape, when generalising words. All subjects of this research tended to overextend classifiers with countable nouns, or nouns which they
are not familiar with, according to their shape. Overextensions occurred when children attempted to use a classifier which denotes some salient properties to classify nouns which appear in similar shapes. Children also produced a great deal of
overgeneralisations when they acquired a new classifier. Data from this research support the emergentists’ competition hypothesis that irregulars and regularised nouns can appear randomly when children are in the stage of ‘reorganisation’ or
‘competition period’. It takes time to pass through this process to reach the stage where they can use classifiers like adults.