Children’s Chinese Vocabulary Study Based on a Corpus of Animated Films

Abstract

This study draws on 30 seasons and 2,332 episodes from three popular Chinese animated series—Big Head Son and Small Head Dad, Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, and Boonie Bears—to construct a specialized corpus of children’s animation and examine lexical features in children’s Chinese through corpus-linguistic methods. Analysis at the character level shows a strong concentration of high-frequency characters, with “我”, “不”, “了”, “的”, and “你” ranking highest. The distribution of the top 100 and 200 characters indicates that most belong to Level 1 and Level 2 of the Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education. At the word level, the five most frequent items are all monosyllabic—“我”, “的”, “了”, “啊”, and “你”—while statistical analysis of the top 200 words further confirms the predominance of Level 1 and Level 2 vocabulary under the same standards. Vocabulary unique to each series reflects thematic orientations: Big Head Son and Small Head Dad emphasizes daily life and family-related terms; Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf builds a lexicon around a “challenge–collaboration–solution” narrative; and Boonie Bears foregrounds terminology related to wildlife and forest ecology.