Production of disyllabic Mandarin tones by children

Abstract

Two‐ to six‐year‐old children’s productions of Mandarin lexical tones in familiar disyllabic words were examined to determine the time course of tone development and the effect of complexity of fundamental frequency contours (f0) on rate of acquisition. Disyllabic tone (DT) productions of 44 children and 12 of their mothers were elicited in a picture naming task and were low‐pass filtered to eliminate lexical information. Judges categorized the DTs based on the filtered stimuli without lexical support. Adults’ and children’s DTs were categorized with 96% and 65% accuracy, respectively. Tone accuracy increased while intersubject variability decreased with age. Children as old as 6 years did not attain adultlike accuracy. Different DT combinations developed at different rates. DTs with more complex f0 contours were more difficult for children. Substitution patterns and acoustic analysis revealed that when producing tones with large transitions at the syllable boundary, children tended to modify the f0 in the first syllable to reduce the f0 shift at the boundary of the first and second syllable, resulting in more errors in the tones in the first syllable than in the second syllable. The results suggest physiological constraints on tone development. [Work supported by NIH 5F31DC8470 and NSF.]