School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University of Science and Technology.
Department of Linguistics, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University.
Dev Psychol. 2019 Oct;55(10):2114-2122. doi: 10.1037/dev0000781. Epub 2019 Jul 25.
Phonological processes result in surface variants of the same words across phonological contexts, posing potential word learning challenges for children. Mandarin tone sandhi is a tonal process changing Tone 3 (T3) in different tonal and syntactic contexts, resulting in allophonic variants of T3 in connected speech. Previous studies found that Mandarin-learning 3-year-olds were able to productively apply tone sandhi processes in novel compounds, correctly using the allophonic variants of T3 in appropriate tone sandhi contexts (Tang et al., 2018, 2019). However, it remains unclear how these variants are represented in children's mental lexicon. This study, therefore, examined Mandarin-learning children's perceptual representation of allophonic variants of T3. Ninety-four 3- to 5-year-olds and 29 adults were tested. Sensitivity to allophonic mispronunciations of T3 syllables in novel tone sandhi compounds was measured using a visual fixation procedure. The results showed that children, like adults, treated tone sandhi mispronunciations as target-like. Thus, in recognizing novel tone sandhi words, Mandarin-speaking children exhibit flexibility in accommodating the allophonic variants of T3, suggesting that they have developed an abstract T3 category in their mental lexicon. The findings reveal the effect of phonological processes in shaping children's phonological representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
音韵过程导致相同词汇在不同音韵环境下产生表面变体，这对儿童的词汇学习构成潜在挑战。汉语声调变调是一种改变第三声（T3）在不同的声调及句法环境下的声调过程，导致在连续话语中 T3 出现音变变体。先前的研究发现，学习汉语的 3 岁儿童能够在新的复合词中创造性地应用声调变调过程，在适当的声调变调环境中正确使用 T3 的音变变体（Tang 等人，2018，2019）。然而，这些变体在儿童的心理词汇中是如何表示的还不清楚。因此，本研究考察了学习汉语的儿童对 T3 音变变体的感知表现。94 名 3 至 5 岁儿童和 29 名成年人接受了测试。通过视觉固定程序测量了他们对新的声调变调复合词中 T3 音节的音变错误发音的敏感性。结果表明，儿童与成人一样，将声调变调的错误发音视为目标样例。因此，在识别新的声调变调词时，说汉语的儿童表现出对 T3 音变变体的灵活性，这表明他们在心理词汇中已经发展出了一个抽象的 T3 类别。这些发现揭示了音韵过程对塑造儿童音韵表现的影响。（PsycINFO 数据库记录（c）2019 APA，保留所有权利）。
