五南官網-臺灣華語教學研究（2021年6月第一卷‧總第22期）

Interlanguage Tone Patterns in Thai Pre-school Children:
A Preliminary Corpus Analysis
I-Ping Wan
Graduate Institute of Linguistics / Research Center for Mind, Brain and Learning /
Program in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, National Chengchi University /
Taiwan
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to present a preliminary analysis by
providing a detailed corpus study of interlanguage tone patterns made
by 11 pre-school children in Thailand who learn Mandarin as their
global language at Thai-Chinese International School in Bangkok,
Thailand. The novelty of this work is to collect and analyze some data
from a highly reliable corpus, and provide Praat acoustic parameters for
the tone distribution by looking at various tone combinations measured
by plotting the F0 variations in Mandarin. These units involved in the
errors are classified by segmenting word shapes into monosyllabic,
disyllabic or multi-syllabic. Evidence from the data shows that Thai
children have no problem producing Mandarin tones, and are more
likely to utter disyllabic lexicons. Different from the traditional analysis
on the error patterns, which argues that all the error patterns were made
based on the learners’ mother tongue, this study has suggested that
interlanguage can be viewed as the transitional process between the
mother tongue and the target language, and those tone error patterns are
not fully related to their mother tongue, possibly suggesting that Thai
children might have constructed an independent linguistic system
gradually towards Mandarin. In the near future, a phonetically
perceptual task in a low-pass filter for reserving tone information will
be required in the hope of eliminating the transcribers’ bias to rely on
the lexical information.
Keywords: interlanguage tone patterns, Thai pre-school children,
spoken corpus, Taiwan Mandarin1. Introduction
Earlier studies have suggested that infants are sensitive to prosodic cues during
their language developmental stage, and children start to acquire suprasegmental
features such as stress, intonation, pitch, and tone very early in the developmental
process (Kaplan and Kaplan 1971; Clumeck 1980; Mehler et al. 1988; Demuth 1996).
Evidence from Crystal (1986), Mehler et al. (1988), and Demuth (1996) suggested that
suprasegmental features, such as intonation and stress, are acquired earlier and better
than segments. Evidence from 8 children (0;6-1;8) in Taiwan Mandarin leads Wan and
Yang (2017) to suggest the similar pattern and agree that tone is considered one of the
most salient features in tone languages.
Due to different contour and level tones in the tone languages, studies reported
tone acquisition varied in Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Thai (e.g., Mandarin
spoken in the United States: Chao 1951, 1968; Clumeck 1977, 1980; Taiwan Mandarin:
Li and Thompson 1977; Hsu 2003; Wong, Schwartz, and Jenkins 2005; Wong 2008,
2012, 2013; Chen and Kent 2009; Wan and Yang 2017; Beijing Mandarin: Zhu and
Dodd 2000; Zhu 2002; Cantonese: Tse 1991; So and Dodd 1995; To, Cheung, and
McLeod 2013; Tsay 2001; Thai: Tuaycharoen 1977). Cross-linguistic studies on
acquisition of Thai, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Mandarin generally agreed that level
tones are in general acquired earlier than contour tones (Thai: Tuaycharoen 1977;
Cantonese: Tse 1991; So and Dodd 1995; Tsay 2001; Mandarin: Wan and Yang, 2017).
However, different from the acquisition process, studies on language learning have
shown that lexical tones are the most difficult linguistic unit to acquire and be stable,
so error patterns will vary depending on international learners’ language background
(Tseng 2007). Studies reported in Chinese and English showed that international
learners might have different learning difficulties depending on their mother tongues
(e.g., Yue-Hashimoto 1986; Yu 1988; Miracle 1989; Shen 1989; Leather 1990; Tseng
1990; Wang 1995; Chen 1997; Liu 2006; Tseng 2007; Y. Lin 2007; Guo and Tao 2008;
Tsai 2008; Liao 2010; Chen 2011; Ding 2012; Huang 2013; Huang 2014). The relevant
studies have found that in production or perception, the most difficult linguistic element
in Mandarin is on rising and low-falling tones for Dutch, English, Japanese and Korean
learners (e.g., Yu 1988; Miracle 1989; Leather 1990; Wang 1995; Chen 1997; Liu 2006;
H. Lin 2007; Tsai 2008; Liao 2010; Chen 2011; Huang 2013; Huang 2014).
However, for the other international learners, who have a similar tone language
background such as Vietnam or Thai, the error patterns will be entirely different. Forinstance, Vietnamese learners who would find that the most difficult tones to learn in
both perception and production are high tone and high-falling tone (Tran Thi 2005;
Chen 2011). However, Thai learners show very little difficulties in producing tones, but
in terms of perception, the error rate in perceiving rising tone is significantly low,
compared to a higher correction rate in perceiving high-falling tone (Chen 2011). In
general, if their mother tongues are stress or pitch-accent languages, tone patterns on
rising and low-falling tones have proved to be the most difficult features to be learned;
however, if their native language are tone languages, which have more complicated
tone contours than Mandarin, mastering tones might not be a problem for them.
A number of the following studies provided articulatory explanations, markedness,
phonetic cues, or theoretical phonological framework to account for universal patterns
or language-specific phenomenon on tones. Evidence from the articulatory effort theory
led Ohala and Ewan (1972) and Ohala (1978) to report that rising tone is crosslinguistically
longer than falling tone, and needs more energy with muscular control, so
rising tone is supposedly more difficult than falling tone to produce. Vihman (1996)
proposed that there is a degree of markedness to pitch, and suggested that a falling pitch
movement is a natural gesture of speech production and requires less physiological
effort than rising pitch movement.
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