Children’s Acquisition of Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi in Flat Structures

The goal of this study is to examine children’s acquisition of Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S) in flat structures. Syllables in flat structures are parsed either in binary feet from left to right, followed by incorporation of an unparsed syllable or in one large prosodic domain [1-3]. We used an elicited production task to examine non-cyclic parsing strategies in T3S application in sequences of two, three, and five digits. 46 children (ages 3 & 5) and 20 adults were tested. The results show that children could apply T3S non-cyclically in digit sequences, although there were overand under-application errors. In a five-digit sequence, adults (but not children) produced the predicted binary foot followed by a ternary foot. All age groups used an unpredicted pattern made of a ternary foot followed by a binary foot, which challenges the previous account [1-3]. We argue that there is a clear developmental pattern in children’s acquisition of T3S in flat structures, and suggest that foot-building in digits does not always follow the typical foot-building process.