Development of Cantonese monosyllabic tone in typically-developing 4 to 6-year-old children

Abstract

Most previous research on children’s tone development suggested that children acquired tones in the first few years of life. Yet, recent research found a large disparity in age of Cantonese tone acquisition. This study aimed at investigating tone development in 48 four-year-old to six-year-old typically-developing children and 28 mothers. Each of them produced 30 Cantonese monosyllabic words in a picture-naming task and identified 30 Cantonese monosyllabic words in a picture-pointing task. Tone productions were low-pass filtered and categorized by five judges. Tone production accuracy, tone perception accuracy and correlation between production and perception were compared. Results showed that in tone production, while mothers showed confusions among three level tones, children demonstrated significantly lower accuracy and more error patterns. None of the tones produced by four-year-olds were adult-like. Five and six-year-olds attained adult-like productions in two (T5 and T6) to three (T4, T5 and T6) tones, respectively. Children made better progress in tone perception and perceived tones at a higher accuracy than in production. However, none of the tones were perceived as accurately as adults in all age groups, except that T1 was perceived with adult-like accuracy in six-year-olds. There was a weak correlation between children’s tone perception and production accuracy.