The Phonological Development of Mandarin Voiceless Affricates in Three- to Five-Year-Old Children

Abstract

This study investigates the phonological development of Mandarin voiceless affricates produced by Mandarin-speaking children. Thirty-six monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and twelve adults participated in a speech production task. Auditory-based transcription analysis and acoustic analysis were utilized to quantify the relative order of affricate acquisition. Both methods yielded earlier acquisition of alveopalatal affricates at age three than retroflex and alveolar affricates, whereas they differed in the acquisition order of retroflex and alveolar affricates. The former revealed that both retroflex and alveolar affricates were acquired at age five, regardless of aspiration, while the latter yielded earlier acquisition of retroflex than alveolar affricates. Possible reasons for the discrepancy are discussed in relation to the different nature of the two methods. Overall, the observed acquisition order of Mandarin voiceless affricates suggests that child speech development is a complex process, and is influenced by various factors including oromotor maturation and language-specific phoneme frequencies in the ambient language.

The Treatment Effect of Lingual Control Therapy on Disordered Putonghua Consonant Initials: A Single-Case Experimental Design

“…Phonological disorder is diagnosed with reference to normal development, but not vice versa. dorsum (Ma et al, 2022). The rationale is that muscle movements are not shared with in terms of place of articulation.…”

“…This approach aims to improve the accuracy of speech output through imitation and repeated practice of oral motor exercises (Square et al, 2014). According to the oromotor maturation hypothesis, tongue control plays a crucial role in speech intelligibility as tongue control and phonological development are significantly linked (Ma et al, 2022).…”