2-125 - Lexical tones in early infancy: studies in perception, word learning and production

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Lexical tones are a common feature of the world’s languages, but their acquisition by children is not well understood. This symposium brings together a suite of recent studies investigating influences of tone variation on infant speech processing with a focus on Mandarin Chinese. The four studies in this symposium aim to further our understanding of lexical tone sensitivity in infancy by drawing from different methods, different sources of tone variation (e.g. lexical tones, musical tones, non-speech tones), different modalities (infant perception/properties of the input) and different populations (monolingual/bilingual infants). The first study investigated tone discrimination in monolingual and bilingual non-tone language learning infants via behavioral and ERP studies. This study revealed dissociative effects of lexical and musical tone variation on infant tone discrimination. The following two papers investigated tone sensitivity in a word learning context, demonstrating that English learning infants were sensitive to lexical tone variation. The first paper of this pair demonstrated, however, that this sensitivity was not uniform and was specific to particular tone contrasts. The second paper of this pair demonstrated that tone sensitivity was not specific to speech and influenced by the correspondences between Mandarin tones and English intonational contrast. The final paper constitutes a corpus analysis investigating properties of Mandarin tones in caregiver input, which has important consequences for infants’ potential to recover underlying tones in the input. Collectively, these studies draw from neurophysiological, behavioral and naturalistic corpus data to investigate developmental determinants of tone sensitivity in infancy.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

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

Individual Presentations

• Same tones, different perception - the perception of linguistic and musical tones by non-tone-language learning infants - Presenting Author: Liquan Liu, School of Social Science and Psychology, Western Sydney University; Varghese Peter, The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University; Gabrielle Weidemann, School of Social Science and Psychology, Western Sydney University

• Differential use of lexical tones in novel word learning - Presenting Author: Charlene S. L. Fu, National University of Singapore; Joelle Liwen Wang, National University of Singapore; Felicia Lay Sin Poh, National University of Singapore; Leher Singh, National University of Singapore

• Mapping Lexical Tones to Meaning: The Role of Native Language Prosody - Presenting Author: Jessica Hay, University of Tennessee; Ryan A. Cannistraci, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Dorothea Moore, University of Tennessee; Katharine Graf Estes, University of California, Davis

• Tone Production in Mothers' Infant-Directed Mandarin Speech - Presenting Author: Carolyn Quam, University of Arizona; Daniel Swingley, University of Pennsylvania; Jiahong Yuan, University of Pennsylvania; Xin Wang, University of Greenwich