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Research Methodology

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Mandarin Competence of Chinese-English Bilingual Preschoolers

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Abstract

This chapter described the sampling, data collection, and data analytical methods to be used for this study. Overall, this study sampled 80 preschool children from the Singapore Children Spoken Mandarin Corpus (SCSMC) via stratified systemic sampling. They were selected based on their Chinese Exposure Index (CEI) determined by a home language survey questionnaire. The spoken language data were gathered through one-to-one interviews and picture description with the children whose spoken language output was audio taped and fully transcribed to form the database of this study. Analytical methods such as corpus-based lexical segmentation, automated Parts-of-Speech (PoS) tagging, and manual annotation of syntactic complexity and code-switching features were employed for this pool of language data, so as to generate the relevant statistics for further analysis. Conversation analysis was also chosen for the analysis of excerpts to illustrate the various features found from the statistics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Singapore Centre for Chinese Language, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Hock Huan Goh

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Goh, H.H. (2017). Research Methodology. In: Mandarin Competence of Chinese-English Bilingual Preschoolers. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2225-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2225-8_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2223-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-2225-8

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