Mandarin Early Children Initials Of Acquisition Bias Study

Initial consonant error is an unavoidable and common phenomenon during the phonological acquisition process of early Putonghua-speaking children. This thesis defines "initial consonant error" as the regular and systematical initial sounds, which are general in the speech of early children with a common physiological mechanism basis and different from those of adults. Compared with previous studies, the progress of this study has been reflected in three aspects. First, the data is selected from the natural language of a Beijing child aged 01;02 to 03;00. The patterns of initial consonant error generalized based on this data are more comprehensive, which not only confirm the previous conclusions, but also show new patterns; second, this study use experimental analyzing method to carry out comparative cross-cutting study; third, this study explore the causes of initial consonant error from a physiological point of view in depth. According to the data, there are four main patterns of initial consonant error produced by the subject, including substitution, assimilation, deletion and addition. Substitution contains ten ways: stopping, affrication, frication, fronting, backing, aspiration, de-aspiration, exchanging, semi-vocalizing and voicing. The experiment is aimed to support conclusions from a synchronic perspective through analyzing the patterns of initial consonant error produced by another Beijing child aged 02; 00. We believe that the laws expressed by the initial consonant error produced by early Chinese-speaking children are as following. First, the patterns and quantity of initial consonant error at various stages of development have different characteristics; second, the patterns and quantity of initial consonant error has a certain degree of correlation with the sequence of initial consonant acquisition; third, the appearance of initial consonant error patterns has different frequency. On the restrictive factors, the constraint of Physiological factors for the phonological development of early children is mainly embodied in an order of physical domination, and the linguistic factor is also one of causes for the output of initial consonant error. This thesis can be a supplement for studies on initial consonant acquisition of Putonghua-speaking children.