Chapter 5 Discussion and conclusion
5.3 Conclusion
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children’s syllable productions are relevant to their caretakers. Children’s phonological productions may be influenced by the overall productivity and the phonetic content of the ambient language. Furthermore, it can be reasoned that a young child produces a target phonological structure which is strongly related to the input frequency (Ota, 2006). To conclude, the findings lend some credence to the accounts that children’s syllable patterns have largely been influenced by their linguistic environment (i.e. caretakers’ speech).
5.3 Conclusion
The aim of the present study is to explore young children’s syllable acquisition and deletion form composed the words in terms of frequencies and patterns.
Children’s overall syllable patterns, syllable deletion patterns and the child-caretakers’
syllable relationship were examined. From the analysis and discussion of the four children acquiring Taiwan Mandarin, the unmarked syllable type (i.e. CV form) has the highest frequency in the analyses of overall syllable types and syllable deletion types respectively. The more marked and complex syllable structures occur less frequently in the young children’s early production.
At early stage in phonological development, since the children’s word productions are immature and unstable, they tend to use many different phonetic forms to reduce a word in speech development. The segments in the syllable-initial,
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syllable-middle and syllable-final positions can be omitted. We can observe that children tend to delete the postnuclear glide [w] and the final nasal [n]/ [ŋ] in the productions, indicating that the segments in the final positions seem to be more difficult for children to produce. As young children’s phonological systems are immature, the patterns of syllable deletion would occur. Presumably, if their phonological systems become stable and mature, the occurrences of syllable deletion patterns would decrease accordingly.
Concerning the analysis and discussion, the findings can be accounted for markedness theory proposed by Jakobson (1968) and frequency effects (e.g., Ingram, 1988; Zamuner et al., 2005). On the one hand, the children’s most frequently used syllable is CV, and is then followed by CVG. Since these two types are syllables which contain onset consonant and do not contain consonant clusters, they are considered to be simple and unmarked syllable types for the children. The more unmarked syllable types occur more frequently in young children’s speech.
Furthermore, syllable types contain more complex structure, that is, a more marked syllable, may occur less frequently in the children’s words. On the other hand, comparison of frequency effects presented that the child-caretaker has the positive correlation. Children general have the similar syllable patterns with their caretakers, suggesting that the children are sensitive to ambient language at an early age. It may
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be beneficial for future word to trace patterns of syllable deletion for more participants, for longer duration, and examine the age range of each participant’s syllable production.
Finally, we hope that this study may shed light on several issues to the process and pattern of syllable acquisition and syllable deletion of Taiwan Mandarin in the longitudinal observation.
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