3-051 - Tone Sensitivity in Infancy: Evidence from phoneme discrimination and word learning.

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Although tone languages are highly frequent, relatively little is known about how these languages are mastered. The early stages of tone acquisition are investigated here via three directions: tone discrimination in monolingual infants, tone discrimination in bilingual infants, and the integration of tone into early word-object mappings. The first paper demonstrates that infants learning a tone language discriminated native contrasts at 9 months whereas those learning a non-tone language did not. Native learners were better able to discriminate distinctive versus confusable tone contrasts. However, for non-native learners, neither type of contrast was discriminated. The second paper investigated tone discrimination in bilingual infants. In a comparison of two types of bilinguals – those learning two tone languages versus those learning a tone and a non-tone language – discrimination of native tone contrasts was explored. Results demonstrated that bilingual infants learning only one tone language showed native-like discrimination of tone at an earlier time point than those learning two tone languages. In combination, these findings suggest that monolingual and bilingual tone-exposed infants follow a similar timetable for tone discrimination, however, infants simultaneously negotiating two tone languages demonstrate protracted development. Finally, the third paper investigates the integration of tone and intonation into newly learned words. Results showed that intonation was used to draw lexical contrast, even for non-tone language learners. Overall, findings suggest that while monolingual and bilingual infants display language-specific sensitivity to tone by 9 months, the role of tone as a determinant of word meaning takes considerably longer to mature.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Charlene S. L. Fu, National University of Singapore

Discussant

• Denis K Burnham, University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury

Individual Presentations

• Tone Discrimination in Monolingual Infants: Effects of acoustic discriminability - Presenting Author: Charlene S. L. Fu, National University of Singapore; Xian Hui Seet, National University of Singapore; Ashley T. P. Tong, National University of Singapore; Leher Singh, National University of Singapore

• Perception of lexical tone in the first year of life by bilingual infants learning one or two tone systems - Presenting Author: Karen Mattock, University of Western Australia; Pei Jun Woo, Sunway University

• Word learning using tone in the second year of life - Presenting Author: Marina Kalashnikova, Oregon Health Sciences University