| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言學研究所 === 101 === The purpose of this study is to describe children’s tonal development by analyzing the tone emergence, frequency, accuracy rate, and substitution pattern, based on observing monosyllabic and disyllabic utterances in six Mandarin-speaking children in Taipei, Taiwan. This study also aims to examine several cross-linguistic data the theory of markedness presented by Yip (2002).
Six subjects are investigated with the age range from 0;10 to 1;6. The data collection is conducted fortnightly by the author and the research team. Based on video and sound files, a set of coding are employed for data analysis.
The results showed that the high-level tone [55] emerged the first, and it also ranked as the most frequent and stable tone. Falling tones [51] were consistently ranked in the second place within tone emergence, frequency, and accuracy rate. Rising tones [35] and low-level tones [21] appeared late, and were also less frequent and stabilized later than [55] and [51]. The neutral tone was emerged and stabilized the last appeared and last acquired tone.
This study also found the dominated tone combination [21-35] applied particularly in the reduplications of motherese in Taiwan Mandarin. The tone combination [21-35] was proposed to be influenced by motherese, and was acquired as a prosodic whole.
The results of this study and all the cross-linguistic data are examined in Yip’s theory of markedness. The first two constraints obtained more evidence that the features of level and falling in tones were suggested to be the unmarked features in tonal languages. Regarding the third constraint, because most of the tone acquisition data indicated that high tones were acquired earlier than low tones, the more unmarked tone feature should be level, falling, and high.
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