Three- to five-year-old children in Taiwan show little development in their production of monosyllabic Mandarin lexical tones

Abstract

While a couple of studies reported that 2-year-old children in Beijing have mastered the production of Mandarin tones in various contexts, several studies found that three-year-old children learning Mandarin as a first language in the U.S. have not produced adult-like tones in monosyllabic words. This study collected monosyllabic Mandarin tone productions from 33 three- to five-year-old children growing up in Taiwan. Five judges categorized the tones of the 734 child productions and 92 productions by 4 adults via low-pass filtered words in which the segmental information was degraded while F0 information was retained. Adult tones were categorized with 93%, 96%, 82%, and 94% accuracy. Children's tones were identified with significantly lower accuracy (p<.05) at 63%, 50%, 50% and 77%, respectively. Age accounted for 0.2%, 2.4%, 4.0% and 8.2% of the variance in children's accuracy of the four tones, respectively, suggesting little developmental change. Children produced T4 more accurately than T1. T2 and T3 were significantly more difficult. These results are in line with findings in previous studies with children growing up in the U.S. using the same methodology and seem to support that tone development is related to maturation of speech motor control. [Work supported by NSF EAPSI]