Chapter 2 Literature review
2.3 Theory of markedness of tone
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the change of tone in Taiwan Mandarin which proposed by Shih (1988) and Kubler (1985), Tone 3 would be modified to [21] for the dialect variation in TM.
Table 2.10 The tonal representation adopted in this thesis Tone Pitch value Tonal feature
Tone 1 55 high-level
Tone 2 35 rising
Tone 3 21 low-level
Tone 4 51 falling
Neutral neut neutral
Table 2.10 showed the pitch value and tonal features which will be adopted in this study.
The transcription used for the four tones respectively would be [55], [35], [21], and [51].
The corresponding tonal features of the tones would be high-level, rising, low-level, and falling. The neutral tone would be transcribed in the abbreviation ‘neut.’
2.3 Theory of markedness of tone
Yip (2001) presented a theory of tonal markedness to distinguished marked features and unmarked feature in tone. The tonal markedness theory was derived from three types of data. The first type of data was from Hashimoto’s (1987) survey on tone sandhi in 83 dialects of Chinese. Second, she provided data from Cheng’s (1973) quantitative study of Chinese tones in which the tonal inventories of 73 dialects were studied. The third type of evidence was from the acquisition studies conducted by Clumeck (1980) and Li and Thompson (1978). The evidences could be generalized into three rules, and Yip stated that the markedness rules was used “to minimize articulatory effort.”
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Minimize articulatory effort
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
Yip summarized Hashimoto’s (1987) study that contour tones were more likely to be leveled in tone sandhi, and similar results were also found in children’s acquisition data (Li & Thompson,1978; Clumeck, 1980). In numerous tonal inventories which presented by Cheng (1973), it was more likely to have falling tones in the tonal system than rising tones. The third constraint focused on comparing level tones. She found that high level tones were more marked because it needed more strength and could not “minimize articulatory effort.” From this point of view and the evidences from numerous dialects, she concluded that low level tones were more unmarked. The three tonal markedness rules could be examined by the acquisition data from cross-linguistic studies to determine the universal features of tones.
2.4 Tone acquisition studies in East Asia
In this section, I will review several tone acquisition studies cross-linguistically, including Thai, Cantonese, and Taiwanese. Linguists are interested in whether there are language universals in first language acquisition. The tone acquisition studies reviewed here will be compared to the results of the current study in the discussion section. In this
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section, a Thai study focusing on phonetic and phonological development in early speech will be presented in 2.4.1. Two longitudinally conducted researches on Cantonese tone acquisition will be described in 2.4.2. A Taiwanese study, which was also conducted longitudinally, would be reviewed in 2.4.3. Then, there will be an overview of the cross-linguistic tonal acquisition studies in section 2.4.4.
2.4.1 Thai
Thai is the official language used in a southern Asian nation, Thailand. There are five tones in Thai’s tonal system. There are three level tones, including High, Mid, and Low;
and the other two tones are contour tones, which are the Rising tone and the Falling tone.
Examples of contrastive meanings for the same syllable are presented in Table 2.11.
Table 2.11 Thai tonal system
Tone Tone feature Pitch value Examples
1 Mid 33 khaa33 ‘a grass’
2 Low 11 khaa11 ‘galangal’
3 Falling 51 khaa51 ‘to kill’
4 High 45 khaa45 ‘to engage in trade
5 Rising 224 khaa224 ‘leg’
Tuaycharoen (1977) observed the tone acquiring order and age from her son between the age of 0;3 to 1;6. The data collection was done by the author at home about twice a week. The recording collected the natural interaction between the child and his parents and grandparents whose mainly used language was Bangkok Thai. The finding revealed that [33] and [11] were first acquired at the first-word stage aged 0;11, and the next
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acquired tone was the rising tone [224] which was learned by 1;2. The high tone [45] and falling tone [51] appeared unstably at 1;3 to 1;6. To sum up, the order of the tone acquisition on Thai in this particular study was presented to be: [33], [11]> [224]> [45], [51].
2.4.2 Cantonese
Cantonese is a Chinese dialect spoken by people in Hong Kong and Macau in southern China. The tonal system is categorized into six contrastive tones, including four level tones and two rising tones. There are three extra-short tones (entering) which are allotones of three level tones and occur only on syllables which are closed by plosives.
The four level tones are [55], [33], [22] and [11] and Tse (1978) categorized them into Upper Even, Upper Going, Lower Going, and Lower Even. The two contour tones are different from pitch height that the Upper Rising [25] starts from mid to high, and the Lower Rising [13] starts from low to mid. The three entering tones are not included in the tone acquisition studies below.
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Table 2.12 Cantonese tonal system
Tone Tone feature Pitch value Examples
Tse (1978) had conducted a longitudinal case study and collected the tone acquisition data from his son between the age of 0;10 to 2;8. He found that [55] and [11]
were firstly mastered at the beginning of one-word stage at 1;4, and then [33] appeared by 1;8. By this age, the child was still in the one-word stage. [22], [25], and [13] were mastered in the two-word stage which was from 1;9. Tse pointed out that the child was confused about the two rising tones [25] and [13] during 1;9 to 1;10. At the age of 1;10, the child had completely mastered the tonal system. To briefly review the process of tone acquisition in this study, the order was [55], [11]> [33]> [22], [25], [13].
So and Dodd (1995) also presented a longitudinal study in Cantonese tone acquisition by observing four children from 1;2 to 2;0. The results showed some discrepancies comparing to Tse‘s (1978) study. The data showed that the first mastered tones were [55] and [33] at 1;4, and the [25] appeared second at 1;6. The four children’s orderings remained the same before this age. After 1;8, individual differences were found.
Two children acquired the Lower Going tone [22] first, one acquired [11] and [13] first,
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and the other one had not acquired any additional tones by the age of 1;10. At the age of 2;0, it is reported that all the four children had mastered the six tones in Cantonese.
Because there were individual differences in this study, the conclusion could only be made in the following order: [55], [33]> [25]> [11], [13], [22].
2.4.3 Taiwanese
Taiwanese is a dialect of Southern Min Chinese spoken in Taiwan. There are seven lexical tones in this language, but each of it has two tone values. When syllables are in the
“juncture positions,” they are pronounced in the original tones; when they appear in the
“context positions,” the tone sandhi rule would be applied and they would be pronounced in different tones. There are three level tones with different pitch height, which are High, Mid, and Low tones. The contour tones are the High Falling tone and the Low Rising tone.
The last two short tones are ‘Rusheng’ tones and were not discussed in the following tone acquisition study. The tone values in both juncture and context positions are shown below in Table 2.13.
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Table 2.13 Taiwanese tonal system
Juncture Context
Tone Tone feature Pitch value Examples Tone feature Pitch value
1 High Level 55 si55 ‘a poem’ Mid level 33
Tsay (2001) had conducted a longitudinal and big-scale research to observe a total of fourteen Taiwanese-speaking children aged 1;2 to 3;11 in southern Taiwan. The big-scale observation persisted for three years and recorded a total of 330 hours data. In the tonal acquisition analysis, Tsay focused on seven children (3 girls and 4 boys) aged 2;1 to 2;3 whose MLU were longer than two words and could produce utterances longer enough to apply tone sandhi in context position. The seven children’s average error rates in each tone were calculated in the following.
Table 2.14 The average error rate of each tone in juncture position Tone
[55] [53] [33] [13] [11]Error rate
4% 6% 6% 8% 18%In Table 2.14, it indicated that the errors on [55] tone were the fewest. The errors on [55]
accounted for 4% of the total error tokens. The error rates on [53] and [33] were also few, accounting for 6 % respectively. There were 8% of errors on [13], and the most unstable tone was [11]. From the tone error rates in juncture position, Tsay pointed out that tones
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in high pitch such as [55] and [53] acquired more stable than those in low pitch, including [13] and [11]. In addition, the results also showed that the falling tone [53] had fewer errors than the rising tone [13]. To sum up, the tone acquisition order in Taiwanese children was [55]> [53], [33]> [13]> [11].
2.4.4 Overview of the cross-linguistic studies
After reviewing the three tonal systems in East Asia and the relevant tone acquisition studies above, we would like to compare the acquisition ordering cross-linguistically.
Table 2.15 The acquisition ordering in Thai, Cantonese, and Taiwanese
ThaiAlthough the tonal inventories in every language are different, we still can categorize them by tone features. The tones could first be divided to level tones and contour tones.
Regarding the level tones, the different registers of tones could roughly be divided to high, mid, and low tones. Lin (2007) defined that the digit number of 5 and 4 in pitch value were high tones, 3 was mid, and 2 and 1 were low tones. With regard to contour tones, there are mainly two types which are falling and rising tone. Tones that end at a higher pitch than the starting pitch are considered rising tones; tones which end at a lower pitch than the starting pitch are viewed as falling tones.
From the cross-linguistic studies above, the common ground was that the level tones
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were acquired earlier than contour tones among all studies. The earliest acquired tones in these three languages, including the [33] and [11] in Thai, the [55], [33] and [11] in Cantonese, and the [55] in Taiwanese, were all level tones. There was also language-specific phenomenon. It seemed that falling tones were mastered earlier than rising tones in Taiwanese, but Thai had the opposite ordering. In Taiwanese, the falling tone [53] was produced more stable than the rising tone [13], but in Thai, the rising tone [224] seemed to be acquired earlier than the falling tone [51]. Regarding the ordering of level tones in different registers, the high-level tones tended to be acquired earlier than low-level tones. In Taiwanese, the orders showed sequential ranking from high-level tones to low-level tones that the [55] tone was acquired earlier than [33], and [33] was followed by [11]. Also, the Cantonese study conducted by So and Dodd (1995) found that [55] and [33] were acquired earlier than [22] and [11]. However, the Cantonese study presented by Tse (1978) indicated that [55] and [11] were acquired at the time same, [33]
was acquired later, and [22] the last. The sequence of high tones and low tones also showed variations in Thai. Tuaycharoen (1977) suggested that [33] and [11] were acquired earlier than [45], which was the only HH tone in Thai. To sum up, level tones were acquired earlier than contour tones universally; falling tones were acquired more stable than rising tones cross-linguistically except for Thai; high-level tones seemed to acquired the earliest except for Thai, but it was uncertain whether the mid tones were
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acquired earlier than low tones.
2.5 Tone acquisition in Mandarin
2.5.1 Chao (1951)
When observing the process of tone acquisition, early studies were focusing on the age and ordering of the development of tones. A pioneering observation on Mandarin tone acquisition was resented by Chao (1951) who collected speech data from his 28-month-old grand-daughter. Chao found that his grand-daughter could have already distinguished the rising tone [35] and the low-falling tone [214], and could produce tones correctly in isolated words. Though she could distinguish the rising tone [35] and the low-falling tone [214], Chao noticed that she tended to replace the low-falling tone [214]
with the rising tone [35]. However, Chao’s description was based on only one child, and he did not exactly present the whole picture of tone acquisition in this study, the value of the results may be limit to a first glance in the tone acquisition field in Mandarin Chinese.
2.5.2 Li & Thompson (1977)
After Chao’s (1951) contribution in Mandarin tone acquisition, Li and Thompson (1977) conducted a larger and systematic research focusing on Mandarin speaking children in Taiwan. They use four stages to sketch the tone acquisition process:
Stage I: The child’s vocabulary is small. High and falling tones predominate irrespective of the tone of the adult form.
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Stage II: The child is still at the one-word stage, but he has a larger vocabulary. The correct 4-way adult tone contrast has appeared, but sometimes there is confusion between rising and dipping tone words.
Stage III: The child is at the 2/3-word stage. Some rising and dipping tone errors remain. TS is beginning to be acquired.
Stage IV: Longer sentences are being produced. Rising and dipping tone errors are practically non-existent.
The four divided stages on tonal development presented the chronological ordering and the corresponding word length children uttered. The important findings in Li and Thompson (1977) were that the high-level tone [55] was the first acquired tone, and then the high-falling tone [51] was the second. The rising tone [35] and the low-falling-rising tone [214] were acquired the last. By the stages when children have not mastered all tones yet, the switch between [35] and [214] persisted throughout stage II and stage III. This report provided a more complete understanding of the age and ordering in Mandarin tone acquisition. They also provided two children’s substitution strategies in tonal errors. One child replaced all [35] and [214] with [55] and [51], and the other child had constant substitution between [35] and [214]. Although Li and Thompson did the first systematic tone acquisition study in Taiwan Mandarin and sketched the stages of development, the number of utterances or error rates of tones were not documented specifically, so the
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degree of development in the process of tone acquisition was not documented.
2.5.3 Zhu (2002)
A more recent work related to the tone acquisition in Mandarin set more specific criterion on stabilization of the acquired tones. Zhu (2002) conducted a longitudinal study in Beijing on four Mandarin-speaking children aged 0;10 to 1;2 in the beginning and 1;8 to 2;0 at the end. She provided the age of tone emergence and age of stabilization in each subject. The order of tone emergence was similar to that in tone stabilization. The criterion for deciding the tone emergence and stabilization was clearly cited in this study, and the tonal error patterns were presented in specific number of frequencies. The results showed that the high-level tone [55] was firstly emerged and stabilized. The second one was the falling tone [51], and rising [35] and falling-rising tones [214] were the last.
When tonal errors occurred, the most frequent tone that realized to replace the error was the high-level tone, and high-level tone seemed to be replaced by the falling tone when produced wrongly. However, the subjects Zhu studied were from Beijing, and the Mandarin was different from that in Taiwan. It is valuable to see whether the development of tones would be different in children exposed to dialects in Taiwan.
2.5.4 Summary
Based on the three studies reviewed above, researchers agreed that the high-level [55]
and falling [51] acquired earlier than the falling-rising [214] and the rising tone [35]. But
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the substitution pattern for whether [35] was easier to replace [214] or vice versa did not gain consensus. There was also no precise document describing the tonal acquisition process in developmental stages. Thus, the topic is worth for further research.
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Chapter 3
Methodology
The methodology would include two parts: one is the data collection, and the other is the data analysis. The data were collected by the author and the research team in the Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Lab at National Chengchi University under the NSC project, “Consonant Acquisition in Taiwan Mandarin,” investigated by Professor Wan I-Ping (NSC 100-2410-H-004-187-).
For data collection in section 3.1, I will introduce how I recruited the participated families in 3.1.1, what my subjects’ backgrounds were in 3.1.2, how the observation proceeded in 3.1.3, and what recording equipments were used in 3.1.4. For the data analysis in section 3.2, I will illustrate how I transcribed the data in 3.2.1. From 3.2.2 to 3.2.4, I will show how I arranged the data in order to obtain the result of the tone emergence ordering, frequency, accuracy rate, and the substitution pattern in tonal errors.
3.1 Data collection
This section contains the process of recruitment in 3.1.1, the background information of the informants in 3.1.2, the observational procedures in 3.1.3, and the recording equipments in 3.1.4.
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3.1.1 Recruitment
The participated families were recruited through an advertisement on a popular parent forum called Babyhome (http://www.babyhome.com.tw/), on the behalf of the NSC project investigated by Professor Wan I-Ping (NSC 100-2410-H-004-187-). In the non-profit advertisement forum, an article was pasted to declare the academic research purpose, and to ask for recruiting children aged from 0;8 to 1;0 who was at the beginning stage of their language development. Parents who wanted to join the research could sign up by filling out the online registration form designed by the “Google doc spread sheet,”
which could be customized by users. There were totally 16 families enrolled in the NSC project, but only 6 children fit in this study.
3.1.2 Subject
The six children were all from middle class families in Taipei City or New Taipei City. These families were all core families that the children only lived with their parents, and the informants were all taken cared by their mothers for the whole day. All Mothers used Mandarin Chinese to communicate with their children, so these children’s first language was determined to be Mandarin.
Among the 6 subjects, three of them were males and three were females. From the beginning of the observation, their ages were between 0;10 to 1;1 (mean age= 0;11.67, SD= 0.8 months). The observation continued for eight months. At the end of the
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0.05 months). The six subjects were all healthy and had not detected with any hearing or intellectual impairment.
The subjects’ language development was around the one-word stage that some of them had not produced any meaningful words yet, but some of them had already produced some meaningful words with clear lexical tones. Among these six children, three of them were the only child in their family, including subject #1, #3, and #4. The other three were the second child, including subject #2, #5, and #6 whose older siblings were all brothers, and the age gaps between the first and second children were smaller than four years old. The subjects’ background information is presented below.
Table 3.1 The data collecting information on subjects and recordings Subject Gender Age range Duration
#1 M 1;1-1;6 6 months
The data collection started from January 2012 to the present. There were over six research assistants in the research team, and the team sent two assistants to an informant’s house to record the spontaneous speech between the child and the mother every two weeks. The recording was about sixty minutes long for one time, but it might be shorter if
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the children felt tired and started to cry. During the recording, one of the assistants was in charge of the video-taping who had to step aside, stabilize the camera, and make sure to film the child’s face and the object he/she was playing; the other assistant had to hold the digital sound recorder, stay near the child, and interact with the child. The research assistants would not bring any toy or reading-material to the family, but might use their own toys to ask questions or attract the child’s attention. Because three of my informants had older siblings, sometimes the older child would join the free-play while recording.
Although the older sibling usually performed better language competence than the younger one and would interfere the recording, some Mothers told us that the younger child uttered more words when playing with their older siblings.
The participated families were paid NT$80 per visit, and they could receive an album of their own video recordings as a souvenir at the end of the term in the research project. The rewards, equipments and cost were all supported by the NCS project (NSC 100-2410-H-004-187-).
3.1.4 Recording equipments
We used both video-recording and sound-recording equipments, which were Sony DCR-SR40 Handycam digital video camera recorder and the Sony ICD- UX513F digital voice recorder. The sizes of these equipments were both very small and functioned well.
Both equipment provided high-quality digital files. The video files helped us decode the