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Lexical tone variation and spoken word recognition in preschool children: effects of perceptual salience*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2016

LEHER SINGH ,
ALOYSIA TAN  and
THILANGA D. WEWALAARACHCHI
LEHER SINGH*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore
ALOYSIA TAN
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore
THILANGA D. WEWALAARACHCHI
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore
*
Address for correspondence: Leher Singh, Dept. of Psychology, National University of Singapore, 9 Arts Link, Singapore117570. e-mail: leher.singh.nus@gmail.com
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Abstract

Children undergo gradual progression in their ability to differentiate correct and incorrect pronunciations of words, a process that is crucial to establishing a native vocabulary. For the most part, the development of mature phonological representations has been researched by investigating children's sensitivity to consonant and vowel variation, with a much lesser focus on lexical tones. The current study investigates sensitivity to lexical tones in word recognition with specific attention to role of perceptual salience. Chinese-speaking preschoolers were presented with familiar words that were correctly pronounced, substituted for a subtle tone variant (Tones 2 and 3), or substituted for a salient tone variant (Tones 1 and 4). Results demonstrated that subtle tone variants were mistakenly perceived as correct pronunciations and only salient tone variants were recognized as mispronunciations. Findings suggest that tone integration follows a more complex developmental course that previously concluded.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , July 2017 , pp. 924 - 942
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

[*]

We are grateful to an Academic Research Fund grant (MOE Tier 1 FY2013-FRC2-009) to support the research reported in this paper.

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