ABSTRACT
Young children’s acquisition of the concept of time should have universal features. According to the item-based learning theory by M. Tomasello, the unit for language acquisition is utterance or construction – not single words or abstract categories. Children identify individual linguistic elements from utterances or structures and acquire these linguistic elements through role-playing and imitation. According to B. Comrie, aspectual and temporal meanings are two cognitive modalities of the human understanding of time. The aspectual meaning expresses the specific state of one or more stages in the time constituency, which is the internal temporal characteristics of a situation. The sequence of temporal meaning as embodied by the acquisition of temporal nouns should be the real order or acquisition in regard to young children’s learning of temporal meanings. The adverbs that indicate time are functionally similar to aspectual markers.
