Doctoral Dissertation Research: Children's Acquisition of Tone Sandhi in Mandarin

当儿童习得他们的第一语言时，他们不仅需要弄清楚他们正在习得的语言的不同语言成分(声音结构、句型结构和单词)的性质，而且他们还需要了解这些成分是如何相互作用的。虽然我们对句法和音系习得的里程碑有很好的了解，但我们对音系和句法之间映射规则的习得知之甚少。这个项目考察了普通话中语音规则(称为三声变调)的习得，该规则部分依赖于句法结构中的信息。虽然在普通话中可以通过4个不同的基音轮廓来区分单词，但由于它们与句法中的其他声调单位结合在一起，声调并不总是保持不变。3变调是一种规则，当同一节奏单位内的另一个3变调紧随其后时，将一个被称为3变调的变调转换为2变调。尽管表面上看起来很简单，但为了应用这一规则，儿童必须学习特定音节的基本音调，必须将单词组合成层次结构(句子)，然后必须在句法输出时建立节奏单位。三连读变调提供了一个独特的窗口，以确定儿童在不同发展阶段(2至6岁)与成人相比在语言产生中整合各种信息的能力。研究结果将提供关于儿童关于语音和句法之间映射的初始假设的信息，并将儿童和成人在不同的话语情境中进行比较，以确定成人语言的变异是否影响儿童产生三连读变调的能力。成人和儿童的实验结果都将为普通话中T3的各种理论提供一个试验场。此外，许多中国当地方言/语言受到占主导地位的官方标准汉语(标准普通话)的严重影响，正在经历或不那么微妙的声音变化。本研究提供的方法和方案不仅可以用来研究双语/双方言儿童在不同的汉语方言/语言中习得变调的情况，而且可以研究他们的习得如何受到正在进行的社会语言互动和变化的影响。我们越是了解儿童是如何获得语言和语法的具体方面的，我们就越有可能了解儿童语言障碍可能出了什么问题，并将这些知识转移到应用和临床领域，以帮助那些有语言问题的儿童。

When children acquire their first language, they need to figure out not only the properties of the different linguistic components of the language they are acquiring (sound structure, sentence structure and words), but they also need to understand how these components interact. Although we have a good idea of the milestones in the acquisition of syntax and phonology, we know very little about the acquisition of the mapping rules between phonology and syntax. This project examines the acquisition of a phonological rule in Mandarin Chinese (called Tone 3 Sandhi) that partially depends on information from the syntactic structure. Although in Mandarin it is possible to differentiate words by 4 different pitch contours, not always the tones remain the same as they combine with other tone bearing units in the syntax. Tone 3 Sandhi is a rule that changes a tone called Tone 3 into a Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 within the same rhythmic unit. Although apparently simple, in order to apply this rule, children must learn the basic tones of particular syllables, must combine words into hierarchical structures (sentences) and must then build rhythmic units at the output of the syntax. Tone 3 Sandhi provides a unique window to determine children's ability to integrate various types of information in language production at different stages of development (2 to 6 year-olds) as compared to adults.The results will provide information about children's initial assumptions about the mapping between phonology and syntax and will allow a comparison between children and adults in different discourse situations in order to determine whether variation in the adult language has an effect in children's ability to produce Tone 3 Sandhi. Both the adult and child experimental results will provide a testing ground for the various theories of T3S in Mandarin Chinese. Furthermore, many Chinese local dialects/languages are heavily influenced by the dominant official Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin) and are undergoing subtle or not so subtle sound changes. This study provides the methodology and protocol that can be used to study not only the acquisition of tone sandhi in different Chinese dialects/languages in bilingual/bidialectal children but also how their acquisition could have been affected by the on-going sociolinguistic interaction and change. The more we understand how exactly a child acquires language and particular aspects of the grammar, the more likely we can understand what might have gone wrong in child language disorders and transfer that knowledge to the applied and clinical areas to help those children with language problems.