Production of Mandarin and Fuzhou lexical tones in six- to seven-year-old Mandarin-Fuzhou bilingual children

Abstract

This study investigated the production of Mandarin and Fuzhou lexical tones by Mandarin-Fuzhou bilingual children. Forty children aged 6;11 to 7;6 and two groups of adults (Mandarin speakers and Fuzhou speakers) were asked to produce pre-selected familiar monosyllabic words. Adult judges' perceptual judgments and acoustic analysis showed that: (1) overall, these children's production performance of Mandarin tones was similar to adults', with very high accuracy; (2) children did not reach adult-like production competence in Fuzhou tones by age 7;6; and (3) there was an imbalance in children's development of the seven lexical tones in Fuzhou. Children's late and unbalanced development of Fuzhou tones could be ascribed to their unbalanced Mandarin-Fuzhou exposure, and it is argued that children might transfer the characteristics of the Mandarin tonal system to their production of Fuzhou tones.