Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T07:49:39.109Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The acquisition of coda consonants by Mandarin early child L2 learners of English*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2013

NAN XU RATTANASONE  and
KATHERINE DEMUTH
NAN XU RATTANASONE*
Affiliation:
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, & Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University
KATHERINE DEMUTH
Affiliation:
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, & Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University
*
Address for correspondence: Nan Xu, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Level 3, Australian Hearing Hub, 16 University Avenue, Macquarie University NSW 2109, Australianan.xu@mq.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Little is known about the acquisition of phonology in children learning a second language before the age of four. The study of Mandarin children's early learning of English coda consonants is of particular interest because of the different syllable structures permitted in the two languages. Using an elicited imitation task, this study explored the acquisition of coda consonants and related phrase-final lengthening in twelve three-year-old Mandarin-speaking children exposed to Australian English at preschool. Performance was good on /t/ and /s/ codas, but worse on the phonologically and morphologically more complex /ts/ coda. Although /n/ is one of the few codas permitted in Mandarin, both perceptual and acoustic analysis revealed surprisingly poor performance, suggesting possible L1 Mandarin effects. As expected, longer exposure to English resulted in better coda production. The results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms underlying L2 phonological and morphological acquisition in early child second language learners (ECL2).

Keywords

bilingual acquisition of phonologyEnglish coda consonantsMandarin-speaking childrenearly child L2 learners
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 646 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported, in part, by Macquarie University and the following grants: NIH R01HD057606, ARC DP110102479, and ARC CE110001021. We thank Felicity Cox for assistance with stimulus design and acoustic analysis, Alan Taylor for statistical assistance, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.

References

Bååth, R. (2010). ChildFreq: An online tool to explore word frequencies in child language. LUCS Minor, 16, 1–6.Google Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2012). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [computer program]. http://www.praat.org/ (retrieved April 25, 2011).Google Scholar
Bosch, L., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (1997). Native-language recognition abilities in 4-month-old infants from monolingual and bilingual environments. Cognition, 65, 33–69.Google Scholar
Bosch, L., & Sebastián-Gálles, N. (2003). Simultaneous bilingualism and the perception of a language-specific vowel contrast in the first year of life. Language and Speech, 46, 217–243.Google Scholar
Broselow, E., & Zheng, X. (2004). Differential difficulty in the acquisition of second language phonology. International Journal of English Studies, 4, 135–163.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N., & Keyser, J. S. (1983). CV Phonology: A generative theory of the syllable. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cox, F., & Palethorpe, S. (2007). An illustration of the IPA: Australian English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 37, 341–350.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. (1995). Markedness and the development of prosodic structure. In Beckman, J. (ed.), Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 25, pp. 13–25. Amherst, MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. (1996). The prosodic structure of early words. In Morgan & Demuth (eds.), pp. 171–184.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. (ed.) (2006). Crosslinguistic perspectives on the development of prosodic words. In Demuth, K. (ed.), Crosslinguistic perspectives on the development of prosodic words: special issue of Language and Speech, 49, 129–297.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. (2011). The acquisition of phonology. In Goldsmith, J., Riggle, J. & Yu, A. (eds.), The handbook of phonological theory, pp. 571–595. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Demuth, K., & McCullough, E. (2009). The prosodic (re)organization of children's early English articles. Journal of Child Language, 36, 173–200.Google Scholar
Deuchar, M., & Clark, A. (1996). Early bilingual acquisition of the voicing contrast in English and Spanish. Journal of Phonetics, 24, 351–365.Google Scholar
Dodd, B., Holm, A., Hua, Z., & Crosbie, S. (2003). Phonological development: A normative study of British English-speaking children. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 17, 617–643.Google Scholar
Duanmu, S. (2007). The phonology of standard Chinese. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, M. L. (1974). Perception and production in child phonology: The testing of four hypotheses. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 7, 205–219.Google Scholar
Fenson, L., Pethick, S., Renda, C., Cox, J. L., Dale, P. S., & Reznick, J. S. (2000). Short form versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21, 95–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flege, J. E., Munro, M. J., & Skelton, L. (1992). Production of the word-final English /t/–/d/ contrast by native speakers of English, Mandarin, and Spanish. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 92, 128–143.Google Scholar
Gnanadesikan, A. (2004). Markedness and faithfulness constraints in child phonology. In Kager, R., Pater, J. & Zonneveld, W. (eds.), Constraints in phonological acquisition, pp. 73–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hansen, J. (2001). Linguistic constraints on the acquisition of English syllable codas by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Applied Linguistics, 22, 338–365.Google Scholar
Hawkins, R., & Liszka, S. (2003). Locating the source of defective past tense marking in advanced L2 English speakers. In van Hout, R., Hulk, A., Kuiken, F. & Towell, R. (eds.), The interface between syntax and lexicon in second language acquisition, pp. 21–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hua, Z., & Dodd, B. (2000). The phonological acquisition of Putonghua (Modern Standard Chinese). Journal of Child Language, 27, 3–42.Google Scholar
Jakobson, R. (1941). Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine Lautgesetze. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Jakobson, R. (1963). Implications of language universals for linguistics. In Greenberg, J. H. (ed.), Universals of language, pp. 263–278. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jia, G. (2003). The acquisition of the English plural morpheme by native Mandarin Chinese-speaking children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46, 1297–1311.Google Scholar
Jia, G., & Fuse, A. (2007). Acquisition of English grammatical morphology by native Mandarin-speaking children and adolescents: Age-related differences. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 1280–1299.Google Scholar
Kehoe, M., & Lleó, C. (2003). The acquisition of syllable types in monolingual and bilingual German and Spanish children. In Beachley, B., Brown, A. & Conlin, F. (eds.), Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 402–413. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Kehoe, M., & Stoel-Gammon, C. (1997). The acquisition of prosodic structure: An investigation of current accounts of Children's prosodic development. Language, 73, 113–144.Google Scholar
Kirk, C., & Demuth, K. (2005). Asymmetries in the acquisition of word-initial and word-final consonant clusters. Journal of Child Language, 32, 709–734.Google Scholar
Kirk, C., & Demuth, K. (2006). Accounting for variability in 2-year-olds’ production of coda consonants. Language Learning and Development, 2, 97–118.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, P. (1993). A course in phonetics (3rd edn.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Leonard, L. B., & Ritterman, S. I. (1971). Articulation of /s/ as a function of cluster and word frequency of occurrence. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 14, 476–485.Google Scholar
Leopold, W. F. (1949). Original invention in infant language. Symposium, 3, 66–75.Google Scholar
Levelt, C. C., Schiller, N. O., & Levelt, W. J. (2000). The acquisition of syllable types. Language Acquisition, 8, 237–264.Google Scholar
Li, F., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M. E. (2009). Contrast and covert contrast: The phonetic development of voiceless sibilant fricatives in English and Japanese toddlers. Journal of Phonetics, 37, 111–124.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mehler, J., Dupoux, E., Nazzi, T., & Dehaene-Lamberts, G. (1996). Coping with linguistic diversity: The infant's viewpoint. In Morgan & Demuth (eds.), pp. 101–116.Google Scholar
Morgan, J., & Demuth, K. (eds.) (1996). Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ohala, M., & Ohala, J. (1991). Nasal epenthesis in Hindi. Phonetica, 48, 207–220.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K. (1973). The effect of position in utterance on speech segment duration in English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 54, 1235–1247.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2009). Second language acquisition in childhood. In Hoff, E. & Shatz, M. (eds.), Blackwell handbook of language development. Blackwell Publishing, Blackwell Reference Online. http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode?id=g9781405132534_chunk_g978140513253417.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., Genesee, F., & Crago, M. (2011). Dual language development and disorders: A handbook on bilingualism and second language learning (2nd edn.). Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing.Google Scholar
Polite, E. J. (2011). The contribution of part-word phonological factors to the production of regular noun plural -s by children with and without specific language impairment. First Language, 31, 425 –441.Google Scholar
Prince, A., & Smolensky, P. (2004). Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. In McCarthy, John J. (ed.), Optimality Theory in phonology, pp. 1–71. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Roark, B., & Demuth, K. (2000). Prosodic constraints and the learners’ environment: A corpus study. In Howell, S. C., Fish, S. A. & Keith-Lucas, T. (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 597–608. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Scobbie, J., Gibbon, F., Hardcastle, W., & Fletcher, P. (2000). Covert contrast as a stage in the acquisition of phonetics and phonology. In Broe, M. & Pierrehumbert, J. (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the lexicon, pp. 194–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shen, X. S. (1992). A pilot study on the relation between the temporal and syntactic structures in Mandarin. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 22, 35–43.Google Scholar
Smit, A. B., Hand, L., Freilinger, J. J., Bernthal, J. E., & Bird, A. (1990). The Iowa Articulation Norms Project and its Nebraska replication. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 55, 779–798.Google Scholar
Snow, D. (1994). Phrase-final syllable lengthening and intonation in early child speech. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 37, 831.Google Scholar
Song, J. Y., Demuth, K., Evans, K., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2013). Durational cues to fricative codas in 2-year-olds. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133, 2931.Google Scholar
Song, J. Y., Demuth, K., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2012). The development of acoustic cues to coda contrasts in young children learning American English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 131, 3036–3050.Google Scholar
Song, J. Y., Sundara, M., & Demuth, K. (2009). Phonological constraints on children's production of English third person singular -s . Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52, 623–642.Google Scholar
Stites, J., Demuth, K., & Kirk, C. (2004). Markedness versus frequency effects in coda acquisition. In Brugos, A., Micciulla, L. & Smith, C. E. (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 565–576. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Stoel-Gammon, C. (1987). Phonological skills of 2-year-olds. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 18, 323–329.Google Scholar
Sundara, M., Demuth, K., & Kuhl, P. K. (2011). Sentence-position effects on children's perception and production of English third person singular -s . Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 54, 55–71.Google Scholar
Sundara, M., Polka, L., & Molnar, M. (2008). Development of coronal stop perception: Bilingual infants keep pace with their monolingual peers. Cognition, 108, 232–242.Google Scholar
Theodore, R., Demuth, K., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2011). Acoustic evidence for position and complexity effects on children's production of plural -s . Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 54, 539–548.Google Scholar
Theodore, R., Demuth, K., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2012). Segmental and positional effects on children's coda production: Comparing evidence from perceptual judgments and acoustic analysis. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 26, 755–773.Google Scholar
Tyler, A. A., & Edwards, M. L. (1993). Lexical acquisition and acquisition of initial voiceless stops. Journal of Child Language, 20, 253–273.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. (1996). Phonological development: The origins in the child. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Werker, J. F., & Tees, R. C. (2002). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 25, 121–133.Google Scholar
Xu, N., & Demuth, K. (2012). Acquisition of English codas by Mandarin-speaking adult learners of English. Proceedings of the 14th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, pp. 41–44. Sydney: Causal.Google Scholar