Chapter 1 Introduction
1.4 Organization of the thesis
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1.4 Organization of the thesis
The study is organized as follows. In chapter 1, I have set out the introduction to the research background of this study and research questions concerning data analysis.
In chapter 2, firstly I will review the literature of Mandarin consonants, vowels, glides and syllable types in 2.1, and I will introduce the issue of syllable acquisition in cross-language studies and syllable deletion in 2.2. Theories on syllable deletion will be thoroughly shown in 2.3. The deletion in Mandarin and Taiwan Southern Min will be discussed in 2.4. Chapter 3 includes the methodology of this study. Section 3.1 presents the data collection methods. Section 3.2 is the data analysis explaining how the data were arranged and analyzed. Chapter 4 will present the results in tables and figures. Section 4.1 will reveal the overview of the overall data. Section 4.2 will demonstrate the results of syllable analysis, including the frequent syllable types that children tend to produce and the frequency of syllable deletion in the production.
Section 4.3 will laid out the different patterns of syllable deletion of the four children’s productions. Section 4.4 will show the results of four child-caretaker’s syllable relationship. The discussion and explanation will be provided in chapter 5.
Section 5.1 summarizes the findings in chapter 4. Section 5.2 presents the discussion on syllable analysis. The conclusion for the finding is provided in section 5.3.
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Chapter 2
Literature Review
In this section, a review of literature of Mandarin phonology regarding Mandarin consonants, vowels and glides will be presented in 2.1. Secondly, I will introduce the issue of syllable acquisition in cross-linguistic studies in 2.2. I will illustrate the relationship between acquisition and syllable omission in 2.3. Theories on syllable omission will be thoroughly shown in 2.4. Finally, I will summarize the omissions in Mandarin and Taiwan Southern Min in section 2.5.
2.1 Introduction to Mandarin phonology
There are two parts in this section. The possible syllable types and the syllable
structures in Mandarin will be introduced.
2.1.1 Syllable types in Mandarin
According to Lin (2007), consonants are articulated with obstruction of the airstream in the vocal tract to different degrees based on the manner of articulation.
Consonants can also form constrictions in different locations by the place of articulation. The inventories of Mandarin consonants including glides and nasals are presented in IPA symbols in the following Table 2.1. Throughout this study, the Mandarin phones are transcribed by IPA forms.
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Table 2.1 Mandarin consonants (Lin, 2007) Bilabial Labio-
As shown in Table 2.1, symbols are arranged by the place of articulation and the manner of articulation. Symbols that are under the same manner of articulation share the every feature while symbols that are under the same place of articulation share every feature other than aspiration. The shaded one on the left is voiceless unaspirated while the unshaded one on the right is voiceless aspirated. Nasals and approximants are all voiced.
Based on the studies of Duanmu (2000, 2007) and Lin (2007), the followings are some phonetic properties regarding Mandarin consonants. Firstly, aspiration is a distinctive feature. That is, aspirated and unaspirated stops are separate phonemes in Mandarin. The change of aspiration can change the meaning of the word; for example, the meaning of the word [pa]51 father differs from the word [pʰa]51 to fear. Secondly, the lateral and the nasal [m] can appear only in syllable initial position; all consonants
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except for the nasal [ŋ] in Mandarin can occur in the syllable-onset position, and only nasals [n] and [ŋ] can occur in the syllable-final positions. Finally, alveolo-palatals are not independent phonemes but allophones. They occur only before high front vowels or glides; that is, [ɕ], [tɕ] and [tɕʰ] appear only before [i]/ [j] and [y]/[ɥ].
Regarding the vowels of Taiwan Mandarin, they are classified according to degree of openness (vowel high), location of the active part of the tongue (vowel backness), and lip position (vowel rounding). There are twelve surface vowels in Mandarin, as shown in Table 2.2.
Table 2.2 Vowel phones in Taiwan Mandarin (Wan & Jaeger, 2003)
Front Central Back
Unrounded Rounded Unrounded Unrounded Rounded
High i y ɨ u
Mid e ə ɤ o
Lower-mid ɛ ɔ
Low a ɑ
Among the inventory of Taiwan Mandarin vowels, only the five vowels [i], [y], [u], [ɤ]
and [a] can occur alone as complete syllables. The vowels [i], [ɨ], [y], [u], [ɛ], [ɔ], [ɤ]
and [a] can appear in the open syllables. The vowels [i], [ɨ], [y], [ɛ], [ə] and [a] can occur in syllables closed with the nasal [n]; the vowels [i], [o] and [ɑ] can appear in
syllable closed with the nasal [ŋ]. In addition, the vowels of [o] and [ɑ] can occur in syllables closed with the glide [w] while the vowels [a] and [e] can occur in syllables
closed with the glide [j].
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Glides can be treated as phonetic variants of high front vowels rather than
phonemes in Mandarin because prenuclear glides do not contrast with corresponding high vowels (e.g., Wan, 1999, 2002; Duanmu, 2007; Lin, 2007). When a high vocalic segment alternating with a glide is adjacent to a nonhigh nucleus vowel, there is an alternation of [i] with [j], [u] with [w], or [y] with [ɥ]; however, there is no glide alternation of the high central phone [ɨ] in Mandarin (Wan & Jaeger, 2003).
Finally, since we have introduced consonants and vowels, we then look at the
possible syllable types of Taiwan Mandarin, as in Table 2.3, based on the study of
Wan (1999).
Table 2.3 Possible Mandarin in Mandarin (Wan, 1999)
Syllable Type Phonetic Transcription Gloss
V i55 dependent
As can be seen from Table 2.3, Taiwan Mandarin allows at most four segments in a
raw for a syllable and it is analyzed as having twelve syllable types: V, CV, VG, GV,
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VN, CVG, CVN, CGV, GVG, GVN, CGVG, and CGVN. A syllable that has no coda is called an open syllable, such as a CV, GV or CGV syllable, whereas a syllable that has a coda is called a closed syllable, like CVN, CGVG or CGVN.
2.1.2 Syllable structures
In terms of traditional analysis, the syllable can be divided into two main parts:
the “initial” and the “final”. The initial means the syllable initial non-glide consonant, which can be the consonant or the nasal, while the rest of the syllable following the initial consonant is the final, which could be separated into the “medial” and the
“rime.” The medial is the glide before the nuclear vowel, and the rime consists of the nucleus and the ending. The nucleus is obligatory in every syllable whereas the initial, the medial and the ending are all optional in Mandarin. The maximal syllable is CGVX, where C is a consonant, G is a glide, V is a vowel, and X can be a glide or a nasal (cf. Lin, 1989, 2007).
Although the traditional analysis of Mandarin has been adopted for several researchers, the increasing studies reanalyze the syllable structure of Chinese with contemporary view (Duanmu, 1990, 2000; 2007; Bao, 1990, 1996; Lin, 2007).
Regarding the status of prenuclear glide, the traditional analysis considers prenuclear glide to be structurally part of the rime, whereas the contemporary view shows that the prenuclear glide can serve as either the onset of the syllable, or the secondary
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articulation of the onset position (cf. Bao, 1990; Duanmu, 1990; Z. Wang, 1996). Bao (1990) proposed that the prenuclear glide formed a cluster with an initial consonant.
The prenuclear glide was argued to be part of the onset rather than the rime segment.
Based on the acoustic evidence, dialectal evidence, historical evidence and poetry rhyming patterns, Duanmu (1990) further elucidated that the prenuclear glide is the part of the onset and acts as the secondary articulations.
Since the structural status of prenuclear glides in Mandarin has been a subject of debate, more researchers attempted to resolve this problem by experimental evidence (H. S. Wang & Chang, 2001), or psycholinguistic evidence (Wan, 2002). H. S. Wang and Chang (2001) asked participants to blend two syllables into one in the first experiment, and then choose from two alternatives (i.e. prenuclear glides clustering with the onset or the rime) to break up a syllable in the second experiment. The results showed that the participants preferred to classify the glide with the rime. Therefore, H.
S. Wang and Chang (2001) treated prenuclear glides as part of the final in support of traditional analysis.
However, Wan (2002) proposed that prenuclear glides are part of initial or final depending on the place of articulation of the preceding consonant. Wan (2002) used psycholinguistic and acoustic evidence to reexamine the status of prenuclear glides from speech errors. She claimed that the glide could be syllabified in two ways in
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surface phonological representation. As the glide shared the same place of articulation with the onset, the glide formed a unit with the onset as the consonant cluster.
Nevertheless, while the onset and the glide were not the same place of articulation, the glide stayed away from the onset. Wan (2002) thus concluded that whether the prenuclear formed with an onset or a rhyme largely depended on Mandarin phonotactic constrains and articulatory gestures.
The syllable-structure status of glides in the postvocalic position is faced with different analyses owing to treatments of postnuclear glides and coda nasals. As previously noted, the traditional analysis divides the syllable structure into the initial, which is the onset consonant, and the final, which consists of prenuclear glides, nuclear vowels, and either postnuclear glides or nasals. It is suggested that the postnuclear glide and the final nasal not only were in the same structure position, but were treated as codas (Cheng, 1973).
However, investigators (Lin, 1989; Bao, 1990; Chiang, 1992) described that the postnuclear glides should be considered part of the nucleus instead of the coda based on linguistic data from Taiwanese language games. Lin (1989) proposed that the vowel and ending nasal were treated as different phonetic units in the rhyme position, whereas the vowel and the postnuclear glides were treated as the same unit (i.e. a diphthong) in the nucleus position. Chung (1989) used Hakka data to claim that
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postnuclear glides and postnuclear nasal consonants did not have an equal syllable-structure status. Therefore, Lin (1989) and Chung (1989) both suggested that a structure of postnuclear glides and ending nasals showed an asymmetrical behavior because the postnuclear glides were seen as part of the nucleus instead of the coda.
Furthermore, Wan (2006) attempted to examine the status of postnuclear glides and coda nasals based on a corpus of speech errors in Taiwan Mandarin. She validated speech-error data as external evidence by psycholinguistic studies, which have been used for decades in English (Fromkin, 1973; Stemberger, 1983). Wan (2006) proposed an asymmetry in the syllable structure between glides and nasals in the postvocalic position. Because postnuclear glides were derived from vowels and associated with the nuclear vowel, postvocalic glides were not as firmly affiliated with the coda structure as nasals. Besides, Chien (2011) also claimed that postnuclear glides should be treated differently from final nasals. Based on experimental elicitation of speech errors, results showed that the error frequency of the interaction between postnuclear glides and final nasals was fewer than that between final nasals and final nasals.
Consequently, these studies generally addressed that syllable structure of postnuclear glides and coda nasals did not behave in a parallel fashion.
2.2 Syllable acquisition and syllable deletion in cross-linguistic studies
In this section, I will review studies on syllable acquisition and types of syllable
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omission on different languages, including English, Spanish and French. Linguists are interested in whether there are language universal in first language acquisition and children’s preferred types in syllable omission.
2.2.1 English
The early study of Ingram (1974) found that there were general phonological processes operating in the child’s acquisition, including the deletion of consonant clusters and the deletion of unstressed syllables. He proposed that identifying general rules could account for the children’s simplification strategies. Ingram (1978) then focused on his English-speaking daughter’s first-word stage in order to carefully examine the acquisition of syllable types. Data showed that the child acquired CV and CVCV first, and were followed by CVC form. By the age of two, the child produced most words containing closed syllables in the following Table 2.4.
Table 2.4 Acquisition of syllable (Ingram, 1978)
Monosyllabic Words Disyllabic Words
1;3 89% CV 87% CVCV
1;6 Mostly CVC 47% CVCV
2;3 Most of the words contained closed syllable
Ingram (1978) analyzed the monosyllabic and disyllabic token separately. When the child was at 1;3, 89% of words were CV form in monosyllabic words; however, when she was aged 1;6, most forms in monosyllabic words was CVC. The child was
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acquiring open CV syllables earlier than closed CVC forms.
Moreover, before infants begin to produce their first words, specific and orderly changes that occur in the vocalizations can be observed. Stark (1980) found that in the
“canonical babbling” stage, English-speaking infants in the 6-month-old age started to produce sequences of identical CV syllables (e.g. [mama]). At around 12 or 13 months, syllable strings, with varying consonants and vowels, emerged as the more frequent type in this stage. In terms of syllable patterns, when infants were 10-month-old, syllables like V, VC, and CVC started to appear at the babbling stage.
Ingram (1978) and Stark (1980) put forward an ordering of syllable development:
children acquired CV and CVCV forms first, and then V, VC, and CVC forms are the next steps. Both studies showed that children mastered syllable onset consonants earlier than coda consonants.
Stoel-Gammon (1998) however found that some English-speaking children’s
most common target syllable forms were CVC, far more exceeding the frequency of
CV and CVCV forms. Kehoe and Stoel-Gammon (2001) therefore claimed that codas
were produced early by some English-speaking children because of lexical frequency.
Onsets and codas were therefore presented in some English-speaking children’s first
words. Hence, syllable patterns observed in child language offer a main source of
evidence for investigating and understanding of phonology. Rose and Inkelas (2011)
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proposed that every study on child phonology should be carefully examined, including all properties of the child’s language that occurred in the development.
Although some studies focused on children’s general syllable types and
occurrences of onsets or codas in syllables, other studies were related to the issue
where young children acquiring English tended to truncate forms and delete syllables
in production (e.g., Ingram, 1974; Allen & Hawkins, 1980; Gerken, 1994; Kehoe &
Stoel-Gammon, 1997; Carter & Gerken, 2003, 2004). Young English-speaking
children frequently omitted the initial weak syllables when producing polysyllabic
utterances. For example, when producing a weak-strong2 (iambic) syllable structure word giRAFFE, children tended to produce RAFFE, but rarely omitted the weak syllable of a strong-weak (trochaic) word such as MOKkey, producing MON (Allen &
Hawkins, 1980). The study of Gerken (1994) documented that the 2-year-old English-speaking children showed a preference for words with the primary stress on the first syllable or for trochaic word structure, especially strong-weak syllables.
Recent studies have been concerned with the frequency of use of unstressed syllable omission by age (e.g., Dodd, Holm, Hua, & Crosbie, 2003; James, van Doorn,
& McLeod, 2007). James et al. (2007) focused on 283 English-speaking children’s
2 Throughout the study, S will refer to a strong or stressed syllable, and W will refer to a weak or unstressed syllable. Target lexical items will appear in italics with primary and secondary stressed syllables denoted by uppercase letters.
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weak syllable deletion in terms of different age groups. Results showed that about two thirds of the participants used nonfinal weak syllable deletion, whereas final weak syllable deletion and deletion of stressed syllables could be negligible. Researchers explained that children did not acquire the final weak syllables and stressed syllables until the age of three, whereas they did not master the nonfinal weak syllable in polysyllabic words until the age of seven. Consequently, based on observation of different age groups, it is clearly noted that English-speaking young children’s
omitted syllables largely depend on the stress factors.
2.2.2 Spanish
The early study of Macken (1978, 1992) focused on the phonological development of syllable structures and co-occurring consonants by analyzing a Spanish-speaking child, aged between 1;9 and 2;6. This child showed a gradual increase in complexity in terms of the syllable numbers, syllable types and ordering when producing final-nasal words and fricative words. For numbers, monosyllable productions (i.e. CV forms) and the simplest of two-syllable productions (i.e. VCV forms) preceded disyllable productions of the CVCV forms. In terms of syllable types and ordering, CV was the most common, followed by CVC in this child’s production;
no other syllable types were produced until this child was at the age of 2;6 when the first rudimentary CCV syllables were produced. In general, the child’s preferred
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syllable structure was CV form. Macken (1978) explained that this simple structure CV can be seen in the production processes, adapting adult’s CVCV and VCV both to the CV form.
In addition to the phonological relationship between syllable types and consonants, Lleo and Prinz (1996) investigated the early stage of acquisition of consonant clusters of four Spanish-speaking children, aged from 0;9 to 2;1. Data revealed the following acquisition order: CV > CVC > CVCC > CCVCC. Based on the syllable ordering, they found that word-final clusters were mastered several months earlier than word-initial clusters in the children’s production. Furthermore, they tended to reduce target clusters to a single consonantal position, which could be explained by strategies of different syllabification.
Studies of Macken (1978, 1992) and Lleo and Prinz (1996) showed that children acquiring Spanish tended to omit the target syllables during phonological acquisition.
Macken (1978) proposed three major processes which combined to achieve the optimal CV syllable type: (1) syllable deletion (2) final-consonant deletion (3) consonant cluster reduction. Specifically, Macken (1992) in the following study revealed that the reason why Spanish-speaking children tended to omit the syllable structures because of trochees. That is, the first syllable of words with WSW structure would be omitted, such as manZAna [mən’zanə] “apple” omitted as ZAna [‘zanə].
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In order to account for the omission of initial unstressed syllables, the empirical basis for a longitudinal corpus in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) has been used by a number of researchers (e.g., Prieto, Bosch-Baliarda, & Saceda-Ulloa, 2005;
Saceda-Ulloa, 2005; Prieto, 2006). Saceda-Ulloa (2005) compared the initial unstressed syllable deletion in WS and WSW words of two Spanish children from the corpus CHILDES. Two children produced the initial unstressed syllables of bisyllabic WS words from the start, but there were almost no iambic (i.e. WS structure) truncation. However, at the age of 1;2 to 1;8, children would omit the initial unstressed syllable of trisyllabic WSW words. This omission of WSW syllable structures of young Spanish-speaking children was consistent with previous studies (e.g., Prieto et al., 2005). Besides, the findings of Prieto (2006) accorded with previous studies, showing that the omitted patterns were closely associated with trochee model in children acquiring Spanish.
2.2.3 French
Other than English and Spanish, researchers found that children acquiring French presented a slightly different pattern of syllable acquisition. The early proposal by Fee and Ingram (1982) has noted that 24 French-speaking children, aged between 1;1 and 2;8, who frequently used reduplication would use multiysllables and show limited ability at final consonant production. Findings suggested that reduplication was
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regarded as a general pattern during the earlier stages of phonological development, and final consonant in CVC form seemed to be difficult for French-speaking children.
In addition, Levitt and Aydelott Utman (1992) worked on cross-linguistical studies in order to explore the general and language-specific effects on child acquisition. They focused on the relationship between sound systems and syllable types of one French-speaking child and one English-speaking child. The utterances of both infants at 0;5, 0;8, 0;11 and 1;2 were acoustically analyzed for syllable types. In terms of syllable characteristics, the French-speaking infant less frequently produced closed syllables than the English-speaking infant. Besides, results showed that the occurrences of closed syllables for the French-speaking infant remained stable during observations, whereas the English-speaking infant showed a dramatic increase over time because English has more closed syllables than French.
It is reported that French, with an iambic prosodic word structure that differs
It is reported that French, with an iambic prosodic word structure that differs