It is the aim of this study to explore how children acquire rules of variation

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Motivation

It is the aim of this study to explore how children acquire rules of variation

existed in Taiwan Mandarin. The motivation of this study is based on three facts. The

first fact motivating the current study lies in the significance of studying the

acquisition of variable rules. Contrary to some obligatory phonological rules, variable

rules are optional; one can either apply the rule or not. Since obligatory rules are

applied under certain conditions, they are not as complicated as the optional rules, and

one might conclude that the former are easier for children to acquire. However, with

the complexities and optionality along with the variable rules, it is observed that

children can somehow rule out the adult pattern from the confusions of variation, and,

in some cases, even achieve the adults’ level. It would be important to examine how

children approach the adult model in a community full of language variables, which

are never explicitly explained to them.

Second, there have been numerous research papers focusing on children’s

phonological development, but many of these studies were specific to characteristics

of the acquisition of English. There would be a bias in studying phonological

acquisition by making reference mostly to English children’s data. For example, the

early stages of phonological development are often said to be featured in

monosyllables. However, some studies on children acquiring French, Japanese, and

Swedish provided counter evidence (Vihman 1996). Cross-linguistic data would be

needed if one wishes to establish a thorough theoretical framework on phonological

development.

Finally, the discussion of variation was often seen in the literature of

sociolinguistics, which is usually based on the data of adult speakers, but rarely found

among the literature of children’s phonological acquisition. Since many proposals

vary in the relationships between child speech model and adult speech model, it is

worthy of note to look into language variation from the perspective of children’s

development, in that it would provide a comparison between adult speech and child

speech from a rarely-explored angle. Most important of all, such analysis would help

provide some extensions in the theories of language acquisition as well as

sociolinguistics.

1.2 Research Questions

There are four research questions in this study. The first research question one

would like to study is the possible developmental trend in acquiring this nasal merge.

Obligatory phonological rules are found to be acquired relatively early, but it is unclear

whether optional rules are acquired at equally the same pace. It is therefore interesting

to see whether younger children display a similar merging pattern as adults. Moreover,

if two different sets of nasal merge indeed exist in the society, mainly due to dialectal

differences between north and south, then it would also be interesting to see which set

of the rules children from the northern part of the country acquire, as their ambient

environment is a mixture with both northern and southern dialects.

The second research question one would like to look into is whether there is a

condition effect in the application of the rules. Since the rules are optional, and

previous studies disagree regarding how often they are applied (Chen 1991, Tse 1992,

Hsu & Tse 2007), one suspects that the application rate might be related to speech

conditions, with different rates of rule applications being found in different speech

situations.

The third research question is whether the nasal merge would be influenced by

Zhuyinfuhao (Zhuyin for short), a local phonetic system. During the first semester of

Grade 1, Mandarin is taught to children through Zhuyin. As the purpose of Zhuyin is

to teach the prescriptive Mandarin pronunciation, it is interesting to see whether the

introduction of Zhuyin would disrupt the phonological system in children if they have

already acquired the merging rule. If disruption indeed occurs, one would also like to

see how long the effect would sustain, since Zhuyin is used as the sole medium of

instruction for the first semester of Grade 1 only. For the second half of Grade 1 and

beyond, Zhuyin only acts as a subsidiary system for guiding pronunciations of more

difficult Chinese characters, and is almost never officially used after Grade 5.

Finally, one would also like to see whether the nasal merge affects people’s

organization in their mental lexicon. If lexical decision also indicates a merge, then it

is possible that such a rule has started an increase of homophones, and thus a

reorganization of the mental lexicon, as is implied in Tse (1992).

1.3 Organization

The structure of the thesis goes as follows. Chapter 1 is an introduction,

including research questions and the organization of the thesis. Chapter 2 introduces the

previous issues regarding children’s acquisition on variable rules and the background

of the merge of syllable-final nasals. Chapter 3 introduces Experiment 1, which

elicited kindergartener’s production on nasal merge. Chapter 4 describes Experiment

2, a production task for Grade-2, Grade-4, and Grade-6 elementary school students,

discusses the possible effect of formal language teaching, and provides an overall

comparison across all age groups. Chapter 5 describes Experiment 3, a dictation task to

test on how children and adults perceive the individual nasals which are merged on

the surface, and how they may reorganize their mental lexicon. Chapter 6 is the

discussion on the relationship among all the experiments in this study. The conclusion

of the study is in Chapter 7.