Vowel, consonant, and tone variation exert asymmetrical effects on spoken word recognition: Evidence from 6-year-old monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin

Abstract

Most children are raised in a bilingual environment. However, compared with monolingual language acquisition, relatively little is known about how bilingual children acquire native phonology. Moreover, much less is known about how children acquire knowledge of tone languages in comparison with consonant–vowel languages such as English. In this study, 6-year-old Mandarin monolingual and English–Mandarin bilingual learners were tested on their sensitivity to vowel, consonant, and lexical tone mispronunciations of known words in a preferential looking task (N = 48; Experiment 1) and in an explicit judgment task (N = 48; Experiment 2). Results demonstrated that in Experiment 1 both monolingual and bilingual participants were sensitive to vowel mispronunciations. Bilingual children were also sensitive to consonant and tone mispronunciations. When sensitivity to mispronunciations was compared with correct pronunciations, monolingual and bilingual participants were similarly sensitive to consonant mispronunciations and similarly insensitive to tones, but they demonstrated subtle variance in vowel sensitivity. In Experiment 2, both groups demonstrated reduced sensitivity to tone mispronunciations relative to vowel and consonant mispronunciations. Therefore, in both implicit and explicit tasks, participants demonstrated asymmetrical sensitivity to segments (vowels and consonants) and tones. Our findings are discussed in terms of influences of phonological variation and language background on children’s word knowledge.