Monosyllabic Cantonese tone productions by typically-developing 3-year-old children

Abstract

Large discrepancies have been reported in the age of acquisition of children’s tone production and previous research on Cantonese reported that children acquire tone production much earlier than tone perception. This paper investigated the production of isolated Cantonese tones in monosyllabic words in 19 typically-developing three-year-old children (mean age=3;7, range=3;1-3;11), with their mothers as the reference group. Monosyllabic productions were elicited with a picture-naming task. Five native-speakers rated the children’s and adults’ tones in low-pass filtered stimuli, which reserved the pitch contours but eliminated lexical information. Results showed that children have not attained adult-like accuracy in the production of any of the six tones, which diverged from previous study that documented early acquisition of all tones before age 2;6. The order of perceived accuracy, from the highest to lowest, was T5 > T4 = T1 > T2 = T3 > T6. Children’s major error patterns involved the confusion among tones with similar fundamental frequency height and/or contours, including confusion among the three level tones (T1(HL) vs. T3(ML) vs. T6(LL)) and T4(LF), and between the two rising tones (T2(HR) vs. T5(LR)). The results align with previous Mandarin studies with the same methodology that reported protracted course of tone development in children.