Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Chapter 2 Acquiring Communicative Acts 8
2.1 Introduction 8
2.2 Research on the acquisition of communicative acts 8
2.3 The relationship between development of communicative acts and other language domains 17
2.4 Factors affecting early communicative acts:cross-cultural and cross-linguistic issues 25
2.5 Summary and research questions 33
Chapter 3 Research Design 35
3.1 Introduction 35
3.2 Research questions 36
3.3 Range of data 37
3.4 Data collection and transcription 39
3.5 Measures and quantitative data analysis 41
3.6 Qualitative data analysis 48
Chapter 4 Analysis of Results on Cross-sectional Data 53
4.1 Introduction 53
4.2 Development of communicative acts 53
4.3 Development of syntax in relation to communicative acts 77
4.4 The mother's interactional influence 86
4.5 Summary 95
Chapter 5 Analysis of Results on Longitudinal Data 98
5.1 Introduction 98
5.2 Longitudinal data analysis at 14 months 99
5.3 Longitudinal data analysis at 20 months 118
5.4 Longitudinal data analysis at 26 months 138
5.5 Longitudinal data analysis at 32 months 162
5.6 Summary 186
Chapter 6 Discussion and Conclusion 189
6.1 Findings on the development of communicative acts 189
6.2 Findings on the relationship between pragmatic development and syntactic development 195
6.3 Findings on mother-child interactions 200
Reference 207
Appendix A The Inventory of Communicative Acts-Abridge(INCA-A) 216
Appendix B Criteria and Examples of Chinese MLU Computing Input Unit 224
Appendix C Examples of Data Transcription with CHAT 225
Appendix D Examples of CLAN Output 238