Acquisition Of Neutral Tone By Southern Mandarin-speaking Children

Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. It has four full tones and a neutral tone.Most research is focused on the acquisition of the four full tones at home and abroad(Chen&Kent,2009; Cheng,1973; Chuang&Hiki,1972; Clumeck,1980; Gao, Shi&Li,2010; Li&Thompson,1977; Shen&Lin,1991; Shi,1991; Wang,1967; Zhu&Dodd,2000and2002; and many others), and just few are about the acquisition ofneutral tone (Li&Thompson,1977; Zhu&Dodd,2000). The subjects in moststudies of neutral tone are adults and their productions of neutral-toned syllables arestudied acoustically to explore their acoustic characteristics that can tell the neutraltone from four full tones. Four acoustic properties are duration, intensity,fundamental frequency and vowel quality. There are several studies concerningneutral tone acquisition. And the results show that children have not fully acquiredneutral tone before the age of4. This thesis attempts to explore the neutral toneacquisition by southern Mandarin-speaking children through investigating32Mandarin-speaking children in Changsha, Hunan Province. Both statistical andacoustic analyses are used.Specifically, this thesis addresses the following three questions:1) When do the southern Mandarin-speaking children acquire the neutral tone?2) What is the acquisition order of the five typical neutral-toned syllables forsouthern Mandarin-speaking children?3) What are the acoustic properties of neutral-toned syllables produced bysouthern Mandarin-speaking children?The subjects are32children of3;6to5;6in Changsha and they just speakMandarin Chinese. They were divided into four groups with an interval of6months.They were required to finish a picture-naming task in their kindergarten.1280disyllables with a final neutral-toned syllable were gained and transcribed with thebroad IPA. The author completed the segmentation and transcription twice alone,and two other postgraduates majoring in Mandarin Phonetics rechecked once. Theintra-reliability was95.1%and the inter-reliability was93.2%.Statistical analysis was used to solve the first and second research questions.And Zhu (2000)’s66.7%criteria of acquisition was used in the statistical analysis.And disyllables with a final neutral-toned syllable produced by children who produced all the target words correctly were studied acoustically. F0was normalizedby converting values into logarithmic Z-score.On the basis of the research, the findings below were obtained:1) The subjects aged from4;6to5;0have acquired neutral tone.2) The acquisition order of the five typical types of neutral-toned syllables inchildren’s vocabulary is: reduplication> de (particle)> ge (classifier)> zi(particle)> lexeme type.3) Duration, intensity, fundamental frequency and vowel quality are importantacoustic properties of neutral tone. Duration of a neutral-toned syllable is obviouslyshorter than that of the preceding syllable. But the ratio between these syllables isnot stable. F0contours of neutral-toned syllables vary with the preceding tones. Theintensity of the neutral-toned syllables is not always less than that of full-tonedsyllables. The vowels in neutral-toned syllables are reduced with a recognizablevowel space.