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The acquisition of tone in Mandarin-speaking children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Charles N. Li  and
Sandra A. Thompson
Charles N. Li
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
Sandra A. Thompson
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

Until now, although there has been research on the acquisition of intonation and stress, there has been no systematic study of the acquisition of lexical tone. Based on data collected during eight months of field work with 17 children of Mandarin-speaking families in Taipei, we have found that (1) tone acquisition is accomplished within a relatively short period of time; (2) mastery of tones occurs well in advance of mastery of seg-mentals; (3) the Mandarin high-level and falling tones are acquired before the rising and dipping tones; (4) the rising and dipping tones are substituted for each other throughout the tone acquisition process; (5) unstressed syllables are treated as if they were stressed, the tone assigned to them being an approximation of the phonetically conditioned pitch which they carry; (6) the tone sandhi phenomena associated with the dipping tone in Mandarin are acquired with very little error as soon as propositional utterances begin to be created. Explanations for these facts can be given in terms of the relative ease of learning to control glottal pitch as opposed to articulatory mechanisms, the relative difficulty of rising pitch, and the relative salience of tone in Mandarin.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , June 1977 , pp. 185 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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Footnotes

[*]

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, December 1975, and the 8th Annual Child Language Research Forum, Stanford University, April 1976. We are grateful to the following people for their help on this study: to the parents of our subjects, to Patricia Meng-Chen Li for her assistance in collecting the data, to Cecilia Lim for her help in tabulating the data, and to Dale Elliott, Vicki Fromkin, Louis Goldstein, Jean-Marie Hombert, and Russell Schuh for their advice and helpful comments. The responsibility for what appears here, of course, rests entirely with us.

References

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