Phonetic complexity affects children's Mandarin tone production accuracy in disyllabic words: A perceptual study.

ABSTRACT: This is the first study to examine the effect of phonetic contexts on children's lexical tone production. Mandarin tones in disyllabic words produced by forty-four 2- to 6-year-old children and twelve mothers were low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information. Native Mandarin-speaking adults categorized the tones based on the pitch information in the filtered stimuli. All mothers' tones were categorized with ceiling accuracy. Counter to the findings in most previous studies on children's tone acquisition and the prevailing assumption in models of speech development that children acquire suprasegmental features much earlier than segmental features, this study found that children as old as six years of age have not mastered the production of Mandarin tones. Children's tones were judged

SUBMITTER: Wong P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5555563 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature