Tone templates in Singapore Mandarin: An observational and experimental study
Creators: name: Choo, Rui Qi
name: Keren-Portnoy, Tamar
name: Vihman, Marilyn
Publisher: name: OSF
Year: 2024

description: Poster presented at the 24th International Congress of Infant Studies 2024.

Abstract:
This is a study of early phonological development and word learning in children learning Mandarin Chinese in Singapore. Children’s first words have been observed to be surprisingly accurate. As children produce more words, accuracy decreases: their productions begin to sound less like the targets and more like one another. The child’s favoured word shapes or patterns may be referred to as ‘phonological templates’; these are idiosyncratic child responses to the challenges presented by target word forms (Vihman &amp; Croft, 2007; Vihman, 2019). As children learn increasing numbers of words, their templates reflect evolving self-(re)organisation and ‘summarise’ the child’s emergent phonological repertoire. Two types of templates may be identified: children select words to produce that fit their preferred production pattern (and the target), but they adapt some words that are less like the pattern. Templates have generally been identified in segmental terms (consonants and vowels). However, tone templates have been reported for children learning Cantonese (Mok &amp; Lee, 2018: 2-year-olds) and Mandarin (Lou, 2020: 13- to 18-month-olds). This study was designed to identify possible tone templates in the word forms of children learning Mandarin in Singapore (20- to 26-month-olds: spanning the end of the single-word period and the onset of combinatorial speech). 

Two research methodologies were employed: a longitudinal, naturalistic observational study (audio- and video-recording, six monthly half-hour sessions in the home, N = 4) and an experimental study of the short-term retrieval and production involved in nonword repetition (responses to novel Mandarin stimuli: 36 disyllabic nonwords that conformed to Mandarin word patterns and took into consideration the frequencies of individual segmental sequence and tone sequence combinations as they occur in the language, N = 20). 

Results from the two production tasks converged, revealing children’s use of two T1-x tone templates: T1-1 and T1-0. In the naturalistic observations, T1-1 was both selected (as evidenced by greater use of words featuring this sequence) and used to replace more complex or less familiar tone sequences (i.e., some words were ‘adapted’ to the T1-1 sequence). In the experimental task, there were no T1-0 targets, but many nonwords were adapted to the T1-0 tone sequence: T1-0 was seemingly used as the de facto substitution tone sequence for less familiar tone sequences. 

The use of the T1-x tone templates was expected, given that T1 is the most salient and most often produced (or ‘practiced’) Mandarin tone, in both babbling and early words (Lou et al., 2018). T1-0 has a falling contour that requires little effort to produce; this could account for the sequence also being deployed as a preferred pattern or template (cf. Kent &amp; Bauer, 1985; Lou et al., 2018, Mok &amp; Lee, 2018) for both words and nonwords. 

These findings are in line with previous work suggesting that templates are not only relevant for learning segmental features, but also a provide a path for learning languages that contrast tonal features.