Wong, P., Schwarts, R. G., & Jenkins, J. J. (2005). Perception and production of lexical tones by 3-year-old, Mandarin-speaking children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 1065–1079.
Presentation: Chris
Summary: Sarah
With respect to several insufficiencies regarding children’s acquisition of Mandarin tones, this study aimed to more thoroughly investigate tonal acquisition from both production and perception perspectives. In particular, this study crucially differed from previous ones in that more children subjects were recruited, inter-judge reliability was conducted, and experimental procedures were better controlled. In the production experiment, 13 3-year-old children participated in a picture-naming task, in which 24 monosyllabic words served as targets. Children’s production was then low-pass filtered, and was listened to by a number of judges, who were asked to decide the tonal categories of each syllable. Results showed that compared with adults’ production, judges were more likely to disagree upon children’s production. In the perception experiment, children were asked to identify the picture that corresponded with the word they heard. It was found that children tended to confuse rising tones with dipping tones. A further correlation analysis showed significant relationships between tonal acquisition and children’s language proficiency. Specifically, children with higher Mandarin proficiency succeeded more in tonal production and perception. The experimental results in this study thus implicated that at the age of three, Mandarin children were still not yet fully adult-like in terms of either tonal production or perception. Moreover, among the four tones in Mandarin, dipping tones caused the most difficulties for Mandarin children. It was suspected that this might be resulted from the tone sandhi rule and the perceptual difficulty of dipping tones in Mandarin.
Presentation: Chris
Summary: Sarah
With respect to several insufficiencies regarding children’s acquisition of Mandarin tones, this study aimed to more thoroughly investigate tonal acquisition from both production and perception perspectives. In particular, this study crucially differed from previous ones in that more children subjects were recruited, inter-judge reliability was conducted, and experimental procedures were better controlled. In the production experiment, 13 3-year-old children participated in a picture-naming task, in which 24 monosyllabic words served as targets. Children’s production was then low-pass filtered, and was listened to by a number of judges, who were asked to decide the tonal categories of each syllable. Results showed that compared with adults’ production, judges were more likely to disagree upon children’s production. In the perception experiment, children were asked to identify the picture that corresponded with the word they heard. It was found that children tended to confuse rising tones with dipping tones. A further correlation analysis showed significant relationships between tonal acquisition and children’s language proficiency. Specifically, children with higher Mandarin proficiency succeeded more in tonal production and perception. The experimental results in this study thus implicated that at the age of three, Mandarin children were still not yet fully adult-like in terms of either tonal production or perception. Moreover, among the four tones in Mandarin, dipping tones caused the most difficulties for Mandarin children. It was suspected that this might be resulted from the tone sandhi rule and the perceptual difficulty of dipping tones in Mandarin.
