CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 The Background of Syllable-final Nasals in Taiwan Mandarin
With almost nine million speakers, Mandarin is the most widely-spoken
language in the world, and is officially spoken in China, Singapore, and Taiwan
(Norman 1988). With such a big population of culturally diverse speakers and a wide
geographic distribution, dialectal variations naturally occur. Such differences would
not have caused much trouble when the society is fairly sedentary. However, when
historical instances brought people of different dialects to a geographically restricted
area that facilitates frequent contact, accommodation would necessarily have to occur
in order to ease communication. As a consequence, languages change drastically.
Such has been the linguistic situation in Taiwan.
Before the World War II, Taiwan was under the ruling of Japan, and Southern
Min was the main language spoken in Taiwan in addition to Japanese. In 1949, the
Kuomintang (KMT) government established their regime in Taiwan, and as a
consequence, Mandarin was brought into this island. Because the KMT government
highly enforced the “Mandarin-only” policy through legal measures, the use of Min in
public places and mass media was strongly discouraged if not completely abolished. It
was not until the lift of the martial law in 1987 that Min gradually regained its public
status. Nowadays, Min is also officially taught in schools in addition to Mandarin. At
present, Mandarin still remains as the official language in Taiwan, and Min acts as a
powerful substrate in the society. Many people are native bilinguals of both languages,
although those from the southern part of the country tend to be more fluent in Min
while those in the northern part are more fluent in Mandarin.
This frequent contact and continuous strife with Min has driven Mandarin in
Taiwan to diverge from its Mainland origin in a number of ways. For example, Kubler
(1985) and Tse (1998) found that retroflexes were disappearing in Taiwan Mandarin.
/tʂ/, /tʂh/, /ʂ/, and /ʐ/ tended to be produced as /ts/, /tsh/, /s/, and /z/ instead. He also
found that there was a tendency to neutralize syllable-final nasals, /n/ and /ŋ/. The latter
was changed into the former when the preceding vowel is /i/ or /ə/. Using
experimental methods, Tse (1992) also confirmed this finding. He claimed that
Taiwan Mandarin was undergoing a merger process of /ŋ/ to /n/ in both production
and perception, suggesting that /ŋ/ was a more conservative form used more
frequently by the older generation while /n/ was an innovation favored by younger
people. However, Chen (1991) and Hsu and Tse (2007) disagreed with the claim of an
unanimous merge. Instead, they proposed that the merging direction was to a large
extent vowel-dependent. When the preceding vowel is /ə/, /ŋ/ is more likely to be
merged with /n/. However, when the vowel is /i/, /n/ is merged with /ŋ/ instead.
Possible ways to reconcile the above contradictory results might lie in
dialectal and/or methodological differences. Kubler (1985) focused mainly on
non-standard Taiwan speakers of Mandarin based on occasional observations, while
Tse (1992) chose a linguistically-unspecified group of college students in Taipei as
subjects for his experiment. On the other hand, both Chen (1991) and Hsu and Tse
(2007) used an elicitation method to investigate native speakers of Taipei Mandarin.
In other words, it is possible that both sets of rules are robust in Taiwan Mandarin, as
Ing (1985) has suggested, and the above discrepancy is mainly a reflection of this
phenomenon through observations on different subgroups in the population.
The problem of contradictory results was solved by Hung and Fon’s (2007)
study, which conducted an experiment with adult subjects from two region groups in
Taiwan. In their study, Hung and Fon found that both northern and southern adults
merged /ŋ/ with /n/ when the preceding vowel is /ə/; when the preceding vowel is /i/,
northern adults merged /n/ with /ŋ/, and southern adults merged /ŋ/ with /n/. This
finding suggested that both sets of rules existed in Taiwan, and the direction of merge
relied on the factors of preceding vowel and region.
Moreover, the results suggested that the application rates of merge rules varied
under different settings. Hung and Fon (2007) designed three conditions for their
experiment, in which the subjects read the stimuli three times, once in Zhuyin, once in
Chinese characters, and once in sentences. They found that subjects were the most
likely to merge final nasals under the most artificial setting, that is, the Zhuyin
Condition. When subjects were under the least artificial Sentence Condition, nasal
merge was the least applied. This new discovery explained why earlier studies
disagree on how much the rules were applied, in that the application rates of the
nasal-merge rules were dependent on different speech situations.
2.2 The Acquisition of Variable Rules
In addition to solving the disagreement among previous studies, the main part
of the current study is to find out children’s possible developmental trend of acquiring
these final-nasal rules. The rules under discussion are free variation in speech. In
other words, the applications of these rules are optional. Many studies on children’s
phonological acquisition have been on obligatory rules; studies on acquisition of
optional rules are rare. One of them was a study about the phonological variation of
the grammatical morpheme –ing in English (Fischer 1958). In his study, Fischer
found that the 3- and 4-year-old girls used more [i˜]’s than the boys of the same age.
He also found that the 10-year-old boys used more [i˜]’s in a formal interview and
more [in]’s in a less formal situation. However, the age of the children was not a
factor in Fischer’s study. There is no way to know what impact of children of
different ages had on the variation of the suffix –ing.
A much more recent study was by Roberts (1994), who examined pre-school
children’s production on the variation of –ing. Roberts found that most 3-year-olds in
her experiment had mastered the process of variation of –ing, and their learning
process of this rule was dialect-specific.
There are certain factors encouraging or discouraging the application of the
nasal merge in Taiwan Mandarin. Since no studies on the acquisition of nasal merge
have ever been acted upon before, the current study would be of significance
concerning children’s development on such commonly seen yet non-mandatory rules.
