Three-year-old children's production of native mandarin Chinese lexical tones

Abstract

The current study investigated native Mandarin Chinese children’s production of native lexical tones, in particular the low-rising tone (T2) and low-dipping tone (T3), which are acoustically most similar among all the Mandarin lexical tones. Using a picture naming task, ten 3-year-old children produced fourteen monosyllabic and disyllabic familiar words. Ten female adult listeners performed the same task as a control group. Acoustical measurements on pitch values and pitch alignment were conducted to analyze whether children made use of acoustical cues to distinguish T2 and T3 in an adult like way, and whether presence of tonal context in the disyllabic words influenced the acoustical implementation of T2 and T3. The results showed that, overall children exhibited adult-like pitch contour for T2 and T3, yet unlike adults who maintained the low feature of T3 for both pitch minimum and pitch maximum, children tended to increase the pitch maximum and consequently the pitch range to allow for implementation of the complex pitch contour of T3. Such increase is more evident for the disyllabic than for the monosyllabic words. These findings suggest that the presence of tonal context and tonal carry-over effect makes it more demanding for children to realize the complex pitch contour of T3, and they increase the pitch range to achieve such a goal.