Development Of Categorical Perception In Mandarin-speaking Children

Categorical perception is one of the significant features of speech perception,and the development of categorical perception plays an important role in children’s language acquisition.Although several previous studies have paid attention to the development of categorical perception in English-speaking children,the perception of different distinctive features of Mandarin phonemes in children remains unknown.To track the course of the development of language perception in Mandarin-speaking children comprehensively,the present research focused on the perception of Mandarin tones,vowels,places of articulation(i.e.,transitions)and methods of articulation(i.e.,voice onset time,VOTs)emerging in 40 six-to ten-year-old children and 24 adults,in order to discover the developmental trajectory of the perception of different types of phonological contrasts,and we hope that it would be useful for the diagnosis of language delay in young children.In this paper,we carried out the research mainly from the following five aspects:Firstly,we chose and recorded four pairs of speech samples in different tones:/i/55(衣)-/i/35(姨),different vowels:/tu/55(嘟)-/ti/55(滴),different VOTs:/pa/55(八)-/p’a/55(趴),and different transitions:/pa/55(八)-/ta/55(搭).The continua of stimuli were synthesized by TANDEM-STRAIGHT software.Secondly,through the pre-experiments,we discovered the characteristics of adults and children in experiments,and designed the corresponding experiment trials by E-prime 2.0 software.Thirdly,several experiments of speech perception were conducted in 24 Mandarin-speaking adults,and the perceptual models of tones,vowels,VOTs and transitions were analyzed as control groups.And then,several experiments of speech perception were carried out in 40 Mandarin-speaking children aged six to ten years.We found the developmental trend of the perception of different types of phonological contrasts in children,through comparing the perceptual models between children and adults.Finally,the impact of two factors-gender and musical experience on the development of language perception were investigated.Through a series of experiments,we found that Mandarin-speaking listeners can perceive tones,vowels.VOTs and transitions categorically,while the perception of these different types of phonological contrasts follow different developmental trajectories.Children aged six years have achieved mature capability of categorical perception of lexical tones and vowels,while ten-year-old children still could not perceive transition like adult.Children aged ten years have already acquired adult-like identification competence of VOT,although the ability of discrimination needs to be improved.Furthermore,musical experience played an important role in tonal discrimination competence in children aged six years,and there was a positive correlation between the cross-category discrimination accuracy and the duration of music learning in this group.But gender did not make any contribution to the perceptual development of different types of phonological contrasts in Mandarin-speaking children.