Lexical Tones and Word Learning in Mandarin-Speaking Children at Three Years of Age(Invited paper)

Unlike Indo-European languages,Mandarin relies heavily on lexical tones to distinguish word identity. Using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, this study examined 3-year-old Mandarinspeakers’ ability to use Mandarin lexical tones in learning new words. Results showed that when children were presented with Tone 2(rising) and Tone 4(falling)pairs, children successfully learned both words.However, when children were presented with Tone 2and Tone 3(dipping) pairs, they learned the Tone 2word but not the Tone 3 one. Children were then divided into two groups based on their learning performance on the Tone 3 word. Successful learning of Tone 3 words was observed in the high performers but not in the low performers, who consistently misused Tone 3 as Tone 2. This study showed that Mandarinspeaking 3-year-olds could use lexical tones to learn words under experimental conditions, and that the difficulty of Tone 3 acquisition may be related to its lower level of perceptual distinctiveness compared with other tones.