Development of Cantonese monosyllabic tone in typically-developing seven- to ten-year-old children

Abstract

Most previous research on children's tone development suggested that children mastered lexical tones earlier than segmental features. However, recent studies found that even preschool children have not mastered the perception or production of Cantonese tones in monosyllabic words. No study has examined tone acquisition in school-age children’s or the acquisition of entering tones, which are one-third shorter than full tones. Thus, this study investigated the development of the nine Cantonese tones in 60 seven- to ten-year-old typically-developing children and 21 adults. Each of the participant produced 45 Cantonese monosyllabic words in a picture naming task and identified the tones in 72 Cantonese monosyllabic words in a picture-pointing task. Produced tones were low-pass filtered and identified by five judges. Tone production accuracy, tone perception accuracy and correlation between production and perception were investigated. Results showed that overall, the seven- to ten-year-old have not produced or perceived adult-like tones in monosyllabic words though they perceived and produced more adult-like tones than preschool children. Tone development across age groups was slow with more development in tone perception than production. Weak correlations between tone perception and production were found.