Li Fangfang
Department of Psychology, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB T1K 3M4, Canada.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2025 Apr 13;15(4):516. doi: 10.3390/bs15040516.
Lingual stops are among the earliest sounds acquired by young children, but the process of acquiring the temporal coordination of lingual gestures necessary for the production of stop consonants appears to be protracted. The current research aims to investigate the developmental process of lingual stop consonants in 100 Mandarin-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds using the acoustic parameter voice onset time (VOT). Children were engaged in a word-repetition task and recorded while producing words that begin with /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/. Results indicate well-established contrasts between /t/ and /d/ as well as between /k/ and /g/ by age 2. However, comparing with adults' speech patterns, children's speech productions are characterized by greater within-category dispersion and overlap, as well as smaller phoneme discriminability. Mandarin-speaking children also go through an "overshoot" stage by producing longer-than-adult VOT values, especially for voiceless aspirated stops /t/ and /k/. Lastly, unlike adults who exhibit gender-specific patterns in VOT, boys and girls do not show distinct patterns in their VOT by age 5. These results will be discussed in relation to children's lingual motor control development and the organization of phonological and phonetic structures during the process of language acquisition.
舌塞音是幼儿最早习得的语音之一，但掌握塞音发音所需的舌部动作的时间协调过程似乎较为漫长。当前的研究旨在使用声学参数语音起始时间（VOT），调查100名2至5岁说普通话儿童的舌塞音发展过程。让儿童参与单词重复任务，并在他们说出以/t/、/d/、/k/和/g/开头的单词时进行录音。结果表明，到2岁时，/t/和/d/以及/k/和/g/之间已形成了明显的对比。然而，与成人的语音模式相比，儿童的语音表现具有更大的类别内离散度和重叠度，以及更小的音素可辨别性。说普通话的儿童还会经历一个“超调”阶段，即产生比成人更长的VOT值，尤其是对于清送气塞音/t/和/k/。最后，与在VOT方面表现出性别特定模式的成人不同，5岁时男孩和女孩在VOT方面没有表现出明显的模式差异。将结合儿童舌部运动控制发展以及语言习得过程中语音和音系结构的组织来讨论这些结果。
