A Case Study On A Mandarin Chinese Child’s Tone Sandhi Rules Acquisition

Regarding young children’s phonetic acquisition, there are two hypotheses: one isthe Independence Hypothesis advanced by Lenneberg(1967) which maintains that L1development is a result of biological maturational processes and has nothing to do withperceptual mechanisms, that is, language development is independent of linguisticenvironment and the other is the Hypothesis of Early Interaction by Boysson-Bardieset al.(1984&1989) which claims that language development reflects the environmentaleffects. It is acknowledged that input from the ambient language plays a role inchildren’s very early perception.As we all know, Chinese is a tone language. There are four Tone Sandhi (TS)rules firstly put forward by Chao(1968).A longitudinal investigation on the acquisition of tone sandhi in the earlylanguage development was conducted on a Mandarin-speaking child in this study.Specifically, the present study attempts to explore the following three questions:1) When does the young child master the four TS rules?2) What is the acquisition order of the four TS rules?3) Are the findings of this study in support of the Hypothesis of Early Interactionor the Independence Hypothesis?The subject was born in Hengyang in Hunan province. The subject is observedabout once a month at the length of30to60minutes and the data are recorded in audiotapes by the software CoolEdit (Pro.2.0). The materials are some pictures, dailyobjects, eatings and so on. For TS acquisition, we engaged the subjects in looking atpictures or elicited productions by asking simple questions such as,“zhe4shi4shen2me(what is this)?”,“ta1zai4gan4ma2(what is he doing)?” or “hao3bu4hao3kan4(is itbeautiful)?”. Regarding acoustic study, we analyzed the mean F0and T-value.Main findings:1) The subject has a full mastery of all the four tone sandhi rules before age three.TS3is the first to be acquired at2;7. Then comes TS4at2;8. The penultimate one to beacquired is TS2at2;11and the last one goes to TS1at3;0.2) As the four tone sandhi rules involve different tones, the acquisition of eachrule comes across varying degrees of difficulty. Based on the statistical and acousticanalyses, the order of tone sandhi acquisition is TS3>TS4>TS2>TS1.3） By analyzing the T-value and contour of the subject, we discover that the subject finally reaches adult-like state in applying all the four tone sandhi rules.Similarly, by comparing the T-values and contour of the related tone in each rule of thesubject and that of her caregivers, we find that as time passes by, the subject’sproduction behaves more and more like her caregivers’. Such a result gives a strongsupport to the Hypothesis of Early Interaction, which holds that children’s languageacquisition is affected by the ambient language.