A Study Of Prosodic Modifications Of Interrogative Sentences In Southern-mandarin Child-directed And Child’s Speech

This study explores the child-directed speech and a female subject’s prosodiccharacteristics of interrogative sentences in acquiring Southern-Mandarin. Twohypotheses involve how children acquire their L1. One is the IndependenceHypothesis proposed by Lenneberg(1967), and the other is the Hypothesis ofEarly Interaction by Boysson-Bardies et al.(1984,1989). The former explains thatbiological maturational processes constrai n L1development which is independentof linguistic environment. The latter claims that the perceptuo-motor attunementsalready develop in early language development as a result of linguisticenvironment. The study aims to investigate whether Child-directed Speech(CDS)in intonation level modifies with the child’s growing age, and whether thesemodifications will affect the child’s prosodic development in interrogatives.Specifically, the thesis addresses the following two questions:1) How does the mother modify her prosodic features of interrogativesentences in talking to her child?2) How do the child’s prosodic features of interrogative sentences get close toher mother’s with the growing age?The participants are a child (YCM) aged3;3-4;6and her mother speakingSouthern Mandarin. She is normal in hearing, and she has no cognitive andspeaking impairment. Southern Mandarin is their main language. They areaudio-taped(SONY ICD-SX35) and video-taped(SONY HDR-HCI) almost once aweek lasting for40-60minutes every time under natural observation. Theutterances were taken from the age period3;3,3;6,3;9,4;0,4;3,4;6. There are41recording sessions in all.120utterances are extracted and transcribed. To compareYCM and her mother’s speech, CDS and ADS,120corresponding utterances arerecorded by the mother and the author at natural situation. All the recordings aretransferred into PC for segmentation and analysis. The author converts theaudio-recordings into the ‘.wav’ form through Cool Edit Pro(version2.1) andtextgrids them by Praat(version5.1.31). The segmentation and transcription arecompleted by the author alone and are checked by three MA students majoring inLinguistics. The intra-reliability is97.5%and the inter-reliability is93.6%.The main findings are:1) The top and bottom line values of overall pitch range and tone groupspitch range in CDS are generally higher than those in ADS, which meansCDS is more exaggerated than ADS. As the child grows older, the overallpitch range and tone groups pitch range in CDS are getting close to her mother’s speech gradually, which shows the mother continually modifiesoverall pitch range, tone groups pitch range and the pitch undulating scalein interrogative sentences to make the child better comprehend ut terances.2) The overall pitch range and tone groups pitch range of interrogativesentences in YCM’s speech are generally higher than those in hermother’s speech. As the child grows older, the overall pitch range andtone groups pitch range differences between her and her mother arereducing gradually. The pitch undulating scale of intonation pattern in thechild’s speech is getting close to her mother’s. As the subject exposesmore to her mother tongue, all the prosodic values are getting close to hermother’s, the findings are in strong support of the Hypothesis of EarlyInteraction but not the Independence Hypothesis.