Weak syllables in Germanic and Romance languages have been reported to be challenging for young children, with syllable omission and/or incomplete reduction persisting till age five. In Mandarin Chinese, neutral tone (T0) involves a weak syllable with varied pitch realizations across (preceding) tonal contexts and short duration. The present study…

Previous studies on bilingual children found intact tonal development at the initial stages of interaction between Cantonese and English in successive bilingual children, whereas children exposed to both languages from birth have not been studied in this regard. We examined the production of Cantonese tones by five simultaneous bilingual children…

Children undergo gradual progression in their ability to differentiate correct and incorrect pronunciations of words, a process that is crucial to establishing a native vocabulary. For the most part, the development of mature phonological representations has been researched by investigating children's sensitivity to consonant and vowel variation,…

To track the course of development in children's fine-grained perception of Mandarin tones, the present study explored how categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin tones emerges along age among 70 four- to seven-year-old children and 16 adults. Prominent discrimination peaks were found for both the child and the adult groups, and they were well…

Data on the acquisition of lexical tone were collected from 17 Mandarin-speaking children. Among other results, it was found that: (1) tone is acquired relatively quickly; (2) mastery of tones occurs well before mastery of segmentals; and (3) Mandarin high-level and falling tones are acquired before rising and dipping tones. (Author/RM)

Describes the phonological acquisition of 129 monolingual Putonghua-speaking children, aged 1.6 to 4.6 years. Children's errors suggested that Putonghua-speaking children master four elements of Putonghua syllables in this order: (1) tones; (2) syllable-initial consonants; (3) vowels; and (4) syllable-final consonants. Suggests that the saliency…

This paper reports on a case study of a Cantonese-speaking child age 2 and considers the implication of tone acquisition for tone studies in general, and Cantonese tonology in particular. (NCR)

Results of a longitudinal case study of a monolingual Sesotho-speaking boy show that rule-assigned tone on subject markers is marked appropriately by age two. Underlying tonal representations on verb roots are learned gradually over time, showing an early Default High tone pattern. (Contains 51 references.) (Author)

Describes the phoneme repertoires and phonological error patterns used by Cantonese-speaking children, as well as a longitudinal study of tone acquisition by four children. The developmental error patterns used by more than 10% of children are reported as common in other languages. Specific rules associated with Cantonese phonology are identified.…