The Role of Input in Acquisition of Tone Sandhi Rules in Mandarin Chinese

The Role of Input in Acquisition of Tone Sandhi Rules in Mandarin Chinese Yu-hsin Huang Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University No.162, Sec. 1, Heping E. Rd, Da-an District, Taipei City 106, Taiwan 69321016@ntnu.edu.tw Abstract. This paper sets to explore the acquisition of tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese and the role of adult’s input. From the observation of three subjects, tone acquisition order accords with previous researchers and TS rules acquisition order are TS3/TS4>TS2>TS1, which shows that the order of TS acquisition is influenced by tone acquisition. It is also shown that not until the age of three does the subject complete acquiring tonal system in Mandarin. Adult’s input is found to play a vital role in acquisition of tone sandhi rules; specifically the output-as-input hypothesis correctly explains the correlation between successful acquisition and subject’s simultaneous repetition to adult’s input. 1. Introduction Tone sandhi (TS) constitutes an important part in Mandarin tonal system. However, despite TS rules are actively applied to Mandarin tones, there exists very little data on the acquisition of TS rules in Mandarin. Long after the publication of the pioneering work by Li and Thompson in 1971, conducting the first systematic study on acquisition of tone by children learning Mandarin, there has been no systematic study of the acquisition of TS rules in Mandarin. Even among the studies of TS, only third TS receives great attention in previous studies while the others have long been neglected. Therefore, the first purpose of this study is to describe the fact of acquisition of all four TS rules in Mandarin, based on the observation of three Mandarin-speaking children (1,5; 2,2; 3,0) for three months. This paper provides answer for the first time to the following questions: (a) Is there an ordering in the acquisition of four TS rules under the influence of tone acquisition? (b) How does adult input help acquisition of TS rules? 2. Background There are four TS rules firstly indicated by Chao (1968) in Mandarin, as (1) describes. (1) Tone Sandhi Rules in Mandarin Chinese (TS1) tone 3 � tone 2 / __ + tone 3 (TS2) tone 3� low level tone/__+ tone 1 tone 2 tone 4 (TS3) tone 4 � high falling tone / __ + tone 4 (TS4) Specific lexical items follow their own rules, such as [i55] ‘one’ and [pu51] ‘no’. [i55] is pronounced in tone 1 in isolation, but changes into different tones when followed by other tones. [pu51] is pronounced in T4 in isolation but changes to T2 when it is followed by T4. A great amount of literature has done by researchers in the field of phonology on the phonological development of children acquiring their first language. Chao (1951) in his pioneering study describes the Mandarin of his granddaughter Canta during her 28th month and claims that ‘Canta acquired tones very early. Isolated tones of stressed syllables are practically the same as in standard Mandarin’. (1951:32). Though Chao did not say exactly when the tone is acquired, the description …

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