Children’s acquisition of specifi c classifiers in classifi er languages (such as Chinese) has received much scholarly attention. In this study, preschool children’s overuse of the general classifi er ge in Mandarin is investigated in order to fi nd out the infl uence of caretakers’ input on young learners’ choice of classifiers. In Chinese, the general classifier ge can be used for a variety of head nouns, yet there are some nouns which grammatically require other specifi c classifiers. Previous studies showed that children’s ‘overgeneralisation’ of ge in Mandarin refl ects a rule-based learning mechanism. Methodologically, the elicitation counting in previous studies ignored the authentic input from caregivers, so it is unclear whether children’s overuse of ge is simply a case of overgeneralisation in acquisition or an outcome caused by other factors such as caretakers’ input. In this study, a corpus of teachers’ and children’s natural conversations are used to analyse the patterns of ge in caretakers’ productions in relation to children’s uses of the classifi er. The corpus includes Mandarin transcripts of weekly recordings of teachers and children in a childcare centre in China, and the participants involved are five teachers, seven English-Mandarin bilingual children and twelve Mandarin monolingual children. The results show that bilingual and monolingual children show similar patterns of overuse of ge, and both teachers and children extend the use of ge for nouns which require specific classifiers, though the rate of teachers’ overuse is signifi cantly lower than that of children. The results suggest that children’s overuse of ge is infl uenced by caretakers’ input as well as rule-based learning. Thus, we propose that the caretakers’ input and children’s rule-based mechanism are two contributing factors for the generalized use of ge for young learners in China.