Recent findings on children’s lexical tone development: Implications for models of speech development

Abstract

Lexical tone is important for a majority of the world’s languages. Prior research consistently reported that children mastered lexical tone production between 1;6 to 2;6 of age, supporting the prevailing notion of theories of speech acquisition that children acquire supra-segmental features early and rapidly before mastering the full set of segmental features. However, intriguingly, studies that examined children’s Cantonese tone perception found that children failed to accurately identify Cantonese tones in monosyllabic words until after eight years old, five years after children’s full mastery of tone production at three years old, which questioned early acquisition of supra-segmental features and the widely accepted assumption in speech acquisition models that speech perception precedes speech production. Wong, Schwartz, and Jenkins (2005) started a series of studies using a new paradigm that controlled lexical expectation in tone rating to examine lexical tone development in children and reported strikingly different results. Monosyllabic and disyllabic tones produced by five and six years old Mandarin-speaking children growing up in the U.S. and in Taiwan and Cantonese-speaking children growing up in Hong Kong were not adult-like. Tone production development was slower than tone perception development. The findings shed new light on universal models and theories of speech acquisition.