Mandarin Chinese is a tone language, using tones in addition to segments (vowels and consonants) to discriminate word meanings. Under the direction of Dr. Barbara Davis, Ms. Jie Yang will conduct a longitudinal study of the acquisition of tones by Mandarin-learning children between 12 and 24 months of age. The relationships between tonal, segmental and lexical accuracy in spontaneously produced words will be examined quantitatively over time in each individual child and for the group of children. The studies are designed to test the hypothesis that tone production accuracy is associated with vocabulary growth. Phonological implementation of tone is one aspect of a dynamic system that can be observed emerging in the individual child, in which early motor, perceptual and cognitive capacities interact with a growing lexicon. The three capacities are considered as interacting aspects of a complex system, none of which is responsible alone for emerging phonology in young children in the formative stages of language development. The proposed research will fill a gap in the knowledge of child language acquisition by providing a detailed, quantitative study of the development of tone production in children learning a language that requires lexical use of pitch.
The results of this study have the potential to inform clinical practices in dealing with developmental speech disorders related to tone production or perception in children who speak a tone language, as well as expressive prosody disorders in children who speak intonation languages.
