IULC Publications

Prosody and the Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes in Chinese Languages

By Feng-Sheng Hung

In this comparison study, Hung investigates the influence of prosodic and phonological characteristics on the acquisition of frequently occurring grammatical morphemes in two morphosyntactically similar but prosodically different languages, namely Taiwan Mandarin Chinese (MC) and Taiwanese (TW). Through an analysis of the patterns of realization and omission of these morphemes in children's speech, he concludes that rhythmic characteristics of languages can affect segmentation of input speech by providing different kinds of prosodic handles for the novice to grasp. Metrical feet may offer MC children one kind of segmentation handle: neutral-toned grammatical morphemes that closely follow full toned content words are in a position to be picked up as parts of unopened packages. In TW, however, since there is no opposition between full- and neutral-toned syllables, all syllables contribute equally to linguistic rhythm, and the syllable more likely functions as a segmentation unit for TW children.

150 pages
$15.00

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