Nature versus nurture: Children’s development and perception on syllable‐final nasals in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

In Hung and Fon’s study (2006), it was found that elementary school children in Taiwan also tend to merge /■N/ with /■n/ as the way adults do, and the merging rates found in reading characters and sentences are higher than those in reading Zhuyinfuhao, a local phonetic system. However, while most adults and older elementary school children merge /in/ with /iN/, younger children have much lower merging rates for /i/ no matter under what condition. The first part of this study extends its investigation to preschoolers who have not officially learned Zhuyinfuhao. A picture‐naming task was conducted with 20 kindergarten children. The results show that preschoolers have very similar performances with the adults’ for both vowels. The second part of this study is a perception experiment. Sixty Grade‐2 and Grade‐4 students participated in the task, in which they were asked to write down the characters and phonetic symbols of the monosyllabic words they heard. Preliminary results indicate that these children are apt to treat /in/ and /■N/ words as homophones of /iN/ and /■n/ words, respectively, although such occurrences for /■/ are lower than those for /i/.