Suprasegmental Features Are Not Acquired Early: Perception and Production of Monosyllabic Cantonese Lexical Tones in 4- to 6-Year-Old Preschool Children

Conclusions Contradicting to the long-held assumption that children acquire lexical tone rapidly and early before the mastery of segmentals, this study found that 4- to 6-year-old children have not mastered the perception or production of the full set of Cantonese tones in familiar monosyllabic words. Larger development was found in children's tone perception than tone production. The higher tone perception accuracy but weak correlation between tone perception and production abilities in children suggested that tone perception accuracy is not sufficient for children's tone production accuracy. The findings have clinical and theoretical implications.
Source: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research