Despite the fact that many of the world's languages use lexical tone, the majority of language acquisition studies has focused on non-tone languages. Research on tone languages has typically investigated well-known tone languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. The current study looked at a Limburgian dialect of Dutch that uses lexical pitch differences, albeit in a rather restricted way. Using a visual habituation paradigm, 6- to 12-month-old Limburgian and Dutch infants were tested for their ability to discriminate Limburgian tones. The results showed that both Limburgian and Dutch infants discriminate the Limburgian tones throughout their first year of life. The role of linguistic experience, acoustic salience, and the degree of similarity to the native prosodic system are discussed.

In this study, Limburgian and Dutch 2.5- to 4-year-olds and adults took part in a word learning experiment. Following the procedure employed by Quam and Swingley (2010) and Singh et al. (2014), participants learned two novel word-object mappings. After training, word recognition was tested in correct pronunciation (CP) trials and mispronunciation (MP) trials featuring a pitch change. Since Limburgian is considered a restricted tone language, we expected that the pitch change would hinder word recognition in Limburgian, but not in non-tonal Dutch listeners. Contrary to our expectations, both Limburgian and Dutch children appeared to be sensitive to pitch changes in newly learned words, indicated by a significant decrease in target fixation in MP trials compared to CP trials. Limburgian and Dutch adults showed very strong naming effects in both trial types. The results are discussed against the background of the influence of the native prosodic system.

Discourse particles are notoriously difficult to acquire for second language learners. It has been argued that this difficulty is caused by a lack of equivalent concepts in the learner’s native language. In this article we compare the acquisition of the German particle

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Within the large family of tone languages, differences exist with respect to the importance and phonetic realization of tones. It remains unclear how these differences influence the acquisition and processing of lexical tone. Limburgian, spoken in the south of the Netherlands, is assumed to have lexical tone, but it has a lower functional load than for example Mandarin Chinese. Moreover, lexical tone in Limburgian is subject to an intriguing amount of surface variation [1]. We compared performance of native Limburgians to native non-tonal Dutch controls on a series of behavioral experiments: Discrimination of lexical tone in the first year of life (Exp. 1) and in adulthood (Exp. 2), and the encoding of lexical tone during word learning in toddlers and adults (Exp. 3). Our results partly deviate from previous research on tone languages like Mandarin, but are on a par with recent findings with Japanese children, suggesting that the acquisition and processing of lexical tone indeed seems to be influenced by functional load and phonetic variability.