Chapter 5 Discussion
5.2 Comparison with tonal acquisition studies in Mandarin
5.2.3 The tonal combination of reduplication in Taiwan Mandarin
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difficult to produce. This theory could be verified from all the results in the three studies.
5.2.3 The tonal combination of reduplication in Taiwan Mandarin
In chapter 4.2, the issue of the tonal combination [21-35] in reduplication in motherese was presented. However, there was almost no study noticing the particular use of tonal combination [21-35] of disyllabic reduplications in the Mandarin tonal acquisition in Taiwan. In many cross-linguistic studies, it was reported that reduplication was the major form in children’s early production (Grunwell, 1982). The combination [21-35] is widely used in motherese by care-takers who spoke Mandarin in Taiwan. The tonal acquisition would definitely be influenced by the tonal combination in reduplications.
There was also no research proposed that the tones in reduplicative forms may not be acquired individually, but may be learned together as a prosodic whole. The evidence presented in this study showed that in [21-35] combination, the accuracy rates of [21] and [35] individually were low, but they become much higher in this mass used combination [21-35]. It may be caused by the influences in adults’ input that care-takers tended to transfer words into reduplicative forms that were mostly in [21-35] tone combination.
Researchers believe that children were sensitive to the repeated and regular form of speech sound and could imitate the same pattern more easily (McClelland et al., 1986).
The repeated tone pattern [21-35] might be learned more quickly in children’s mind than
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the individual [21] and [35] due to the more occurrences of the form [21-35]. But more examination should be conducted to actually analyze the frequency of input in these two tones; otherwise, the prediction would only be an assumption.
5.3 Cross-linguistic comparison
In chapter 2, several cross-linguistic studies in tonal acquisition were reviewed.
These studies provided the developmental sequences of tones in several languages or dialects. In the following, I would like to compare the results of the current study to the previous tonal studies, and see whether language acquisition is universal or language-specific. I will also apply the cross-linguistic evidences to examine the theory of markedness presented by Yip (2002).
The result of the current study showed that the tone acquisition ordering in Mandarin was [55]> [51]> [35]> [21]. To compare the orderings cross-linguistically, I gathered the tone acquisition orderings below.
Table 5.2 Tone acquisition orderings of cross-linguistic studies Cross-linguistic studies Tone acquisition orderings
Thai (Tuaycharoen 1977) [33],[11] > [224] > [45],[51]Cantonese (Tse 1978) [55],[11] > [33] > [13],[22],[25]
Cantonese (So & Dodd 1995) [55],[33] > [25]> [11],[13],[22]
Taiwanese (Tsay 2001) [55] > [53],[33] > [13] > [11]
Mandarin (Li & Thompson 1977) [55] > [51] > [214],[35]
Mandarin (Zhu 2002) [55] > [51] > [214],[35]
In Table 5.2, though the tone values in their inventories were different from each other, we could still compare and contrast the chronological orderings by viewing the tones in
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features. The level tones could be characterized by high, mid, and low tones, and contour tones could be categorized into falling and rising tones.
These cross-linguistic data could be used to examine the three constraints in the tonal markedness theory presented by Yip (2002).
a. contour tones are more marked than level tones b. rising tones are more marked than falling tones c. high tones are more marked than low tones
All studies including the results in this study agreed the first constraint, contour tones were more marked than level tones. The first acquired tones were all level tones and all the contour tones were acquired later. The high-level tones [55] in Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese found to be the first acquired tones, and the mid-level [33] and low-level tones [11] in Thai and Cantonese also developed earlier than contour tones. There were no studies showed that contour tones were acquired earlier than level tones, so it could be generalized that level tones were more unmarked universally.
If we considered the second constraint, we could find that the sequences were different between the study in Thai and those in other language. The falling tones [53] in Taiwanese and [51] and Mandarin were acquired earlier than the rising tones, [13] and [35], but the sequence was opposite in Thai that Thai-speaking children in Tuaycharoen’s study learned the rising tone [224] earlier than the falling tone [51]. Cantonese has no
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attributed to individual differences.The last markedness rule could only apply to level tones, so contour tones would not be included in this comparison. Comparing the acquisition ordering among high-level, mid-level and low-level tones, only Thai fulfilled this constraint that its low level tone acquired earlier than the high-level tone. This constraint could hardly find evidences from other cross-linguistic data except for Thai. The first acquired level tones in Thai were mid-level [33] and low-level [11] tones, and the high-level tone [45]3 in Thai was acquired the last. However, in Taiwanese and Mandarin, the high-level tones [55] were acquired the earliest. Especially in Taiwanese, the three level tones were acquired in the sequence of [55]> [33]> [11] which revealed the opposite ordering to the third constraint Yip proposed. The results from this current study also disapproved the third constraint that the high-level tone [55] was acquired earlier than the low-level tone [21] in Taiwan Mandarin. In Cantonese, the evidence from Tse’s (1978) study was not comparable because it showed the spontaneous acquisition for high-level tone [55] and low-level tone [11]. The other Cantonese study done by So and Dodd (1995) suggested that high-level
3 Duanmu (2000) pointed out the of five-point scale of tonal representation had problems. For example, the differences between [21] and [11] could not be detected by Mandarin native speakers. That is, if the slight falling or slight rising would not contrast meanings, they could be seen as level tones. In the Thai tonal system, there is a [45] tone. Because there is no high level tones similar to this tone, we could treat this tone as a high-level tone.
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tones were more unmarked than low-level tones that the high-level [55] and mid-level [33]
were acquired earlier than the mid-low-level [22] and the low-level [11].
On the whole, the first two constraints obtained more evidence that the features of level and falling in tones were suggested to be the unmarked features in tonal languages.
Regarding the third constraint, because the data from four languages indicated that high tones were acquired earlier than low tones, the more unmarked tone feature should be level, falling, and high.
5.4 Concluding remarks
This research described how children learned to produce tones in Mandarin Chinese.
From the analysis and discussion, the high-level tone [55] emerged the first, and it also ranked as the most frequent and stable tone. Falling tones [51] were consistently ranked in the second place within tone emergence, frequency, and accuracy rate. Rising tones [35]
and low-level tones [21] appeared late, and were also less frequent and stabilized later than [55] and [51]. The neutral tone was emerged and stabilized roughly at the same time with the last appeared and last acquired lexical tone. The rankings of tone emergence, frequency, and accuracy rate were identical, which indicated that the tone that emerged earlier tended to be produced more frequently and would be stabilized earlier, and the tone that was used more frequently would have higher accuracy rate.
Concerning children’s reduplicative form, results showed that the tone combination
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[21-35] dominated the tokens in disyllabic words. The tone combination [21-35] was proposed to be influenced by motherese, and was acquired as a prosodic whole by children. Further studies could be done in analyzing the correlation between the frequencies of [21-35] in care-takers and children’s production.
The results in the current study were applied in cross-linguistic comparison including Thai, Cantonese, and Taiwanese. The tonal markedness presented by Yip (2002) was examined though the acquisition data in these languages. The comparison showed that level tones and falling tones which were the more unmarked features were acquired earlier in most of the tone acquisition data. While low tones which were shown to be the more unmarked feature tended to be acquired later cross-linguistically. Therefore, the unmarked features should be level, falling and high among all tonal languages in Asia.
This study provided another tone acquisition data to examine the universal rules in tonal features. Although the results were consistent with most of the previous studies, this study still found the unnoticed tone combination [21-35] applied particularly in the motherese in Taiwan Mandarin. The finding related to the tone combination was still preliminary. In the future study, researcher could collect care-takers’ production and examine the relation between children’s input and output and manage to resolve more questions in the language acquisition field.
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