Abstract
Large numbers of children around the world are learning tone languages, but few studies have examined the acoustic properties of children's early tone productions. Even more scarce are acquisition studies on tone sandhi, a tone change phenomenon which alters the surface realization of lexical tones. Two studies using perceptual coding report the emergence of lexical tone and tone sandhi at around 2 years (Li and Thompson, 1977; Hua and Dodd, 2000). However, the only acoustic study available shows that 3-year-olds are not yet adult-like in their lexical tone productions (Wong, 2012). This raises questions about when children's productions become acoustically adult-like and how their tone productions differ from those of adults. These questions were addressed in the current study which compared Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers' (3–5-year-olds) tone productions to that of adults. A picture naming task was used with disyllabic real words familiar to pre-schoolers. Overall children produced appropriate tone contours for all tones, i.e., level for tone 1, rising for tones 2, 3 and full sandhi, falling for tone 4 and half sandhi. However, children's productions were not adult-like for tones 3, 4, and the sandhi forms, in terms of coordinating pitch range, slope and curvature, with little evidence of development across ages. These results suggest a protracted process in achieving adult-like acoustic realization of both lexical and sandhi tones.
Highlights
Despite recent interest in tone languages, little is known about the acquisition of lexical tones compared to segments
To examine whether children’s lexical tone and tone sandhi productions were adult-like, second order polynomial models were conducted for each tone separately (6 models in total: 4 for lexical tones and 2 for sandhi forms)
Tone 2 showed few differences between child and adult productions with 3-year-olds producing a larger pitch range and slope compared to adults, and 5-year-olds producing a contour that is less curvy compared to adults
Summary
Despite recent interest in tone languages, little is known about the acquisition of lexical tones compared to segments (i.e., vowels and consonants) This is in spite of the pervasiveness of tone languages—it is estimated that more than half the world’s languages are tonal (Yip, 2002). Lacking is knowledge about children’s early productions of lexical tone, and if and how these differ from adult forms This is the case for phonological processes that involve lexical tone change (tone sandhi). Mandarin has tone sandhi processes whereby the surface tone changes depending on tonal context, i.e., from tone 3 to a rising or falling tone The acquisition of such phonological processes has not attracted much attention in the field of language acquisition. We examine the early production of both lexical and sandhi tones in terms of their acoustic realizations to determine if pre-schoolers’ productions are adultlike
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