Abstract
This study examined the production of neutral tone in disyllabic words by two-year-old Mandarin-speaking children. The results showed that children were fully aware of the neutral tone sandhi rule phonologically at the age of two. However, they cannot phonetically produce neutral tone well. In particular, children made off-standard production with higher pitch register, wider pitch range and longer duration, while made correct production with correct pitch pattern but the duration ratio between the initial syllable and the final syllable is slightly larger than the adults’. The difficulty of the neutral tone production is closely related to the type of the preceding tone and the coordination of articulation for disyllabic neutral tone words.
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Notes
- 1.
Another study on lexical tone acquisition of our team showed that two-year-old Mandarin-speaking children still had around 13% tone errors and that the time of lexical tone acquisition was after 3.5 years of age.
- 2.
For some children, they could only have correct production on some neutral-tone words. As a result, the total of the children of the three production types exceeded 60.
- 3.
This was counted based on children’s real production of the first tone rather than on orthography. Children made substitution errors on the first tone, so the number of Tone 1 on the first syllable was counted according to both correct production and substitutions. All the numbers hereafter were counted based on children’s real productions.
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Acknowledgements
The study is supported by two grants from the Key Project of National Fund of Social Sciences, No. 15ZDB103 and No. 13CYY025.
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Gao, J., Li, A. (2018). Production of Neutral Tone on Disyllabic Words by Two-Year-Old Mandarin-Speaking Children. In: Fang, Q., Dang, J., Perrier, P., Wei, J., Wang, L., Yan, N. (eds) Studies on Speech Production. ISSP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10733. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00126-1_9
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