Xu Rattanasone Nan, Tang Ping, Yuen Ivan, Gao Liqun, Demuth Katherine
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Center for Language Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2018 May 28;9:817. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00817. eCollection 2018.
Large numbers of children around the world are learning tone languages, but few studies have examined the acoustic properties of children's early tone productions. Even more scarce are acquisition studies on tone sandhi, a tone change phenomenon which alters the surface realization of lexical tones. Two studies using perceptual coding report the emergence of lexical tone and tone sandhi at around 2 years (Li and Thompson, 1977; Hua and Dodd, 2000). However, the only acoustic study available shows that 3-year-olds are not yet adult-like in their lexical tone productions (Wong, 2012). This raises questions about when children's productions become acoustically adult-like and how their tone productions differ from those of adults. These questions were addressed in the current study which compared Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers' (3-5-year-olds) tone productions to that of adults. A picture naming task was used with disyllabic real words familiar to pre-schoolers. Overall children produced appropriate tone for all tones, i.e., level for tone 1, rising for tones 2, 3 and full sandhi, falling for tone 4 and half sandhi. However, children's productions were not adult-like for tones 3, 4, and the sandhi forms, in terms of coordinating , with little evidence of development across ages. These results suggest a protracted process in achieving adult-like acoustic realization of both lexical and sandhi tones.
世界上有大量儿童在学习声调语言，但很少有研究考察儿童早期声调发音的声学特性。关于连读变调（一种改变词汇调表面实现形式的声调变化现象）的习得研究更是稀少。两项采用感知编码的研究报告称，大约在2岁时出现了词汇调与连读变调（Li和Thompson，1977；Hua和Dodd，2000）。然而，现有的唯一一项声学研究表明，3岁儿童的词汇调发音在声学上还不像成年人（Wong，2012）。这就引发了关于儿童发音在声学上何时变得像成年人以及他们的声调发音与成年人有何不同的问题。本研究通过将说普通话的学龄前儿童（3至5岁）的声调发音与成年人的进行比较，解决了这些问题。使用了一个图片命名任务，其中包含学龄前儿童熟悉的双音节实词。总体而言，儿童对所有声调都发出了合适的声调，即一声为平调，二声、三声和全变调为升调，四声和半变调为降调。然而，在协调方面，儿童对三声、四声和变调形式的发音并不像成年人，且几乎没有随年龄发展变化的迹象。这些结果表明，在实现词汇调和变调在声学上像成年人一样的过程是漫长的。
