Production of Mandarin tones by 3-year-old children acquiring L1 (Mandarin) in an L2 (English) environment

Abstract

Thirteen monolingual Mandarin-speaking children residing in the U.S. were recruited to examine their production of the four Mandarin lexical tones in monosyllabic words. A picture-naming task was used to elicit the children’s productions of lexical tones in isolated words and in sentence final position. Four mothers were asked to say the same set of words to their children in a picture reading activity. The children’s and the mothers’ productions were recorded and low-pass filtered at 500 and 400 Hz, respectively, to eliminate phonemic and semantic information. Ten Mandarin-speaking judges were recruited to identify the children’s and adults’ tone productions from the filtered stimuli. Contrary to the findings of L1 research conducted in countries where Mandarin is the language of the environment, the present results revealed that the lexical tones produced by 3-year-old children acquiring Mandarin as their first language in the U.S. were not yet adultlike. Children’s tone productions were more difficult to categorize than the mothers’ productions. The judges had significantly more difficulty identifying children’s dipping tones than the children’s level tones, rising tones, or falling tones, suggesting that the dipping tone posed the most difficulties for the children.