Word play in language acquisition: A Mandarin case
儿语里的声调游戏–一个普通话的例子
A. O. Yue-Hashimoto 余霭芹

Abstract 摘要
It is known that tones are acquired early in Mandarin, and probably in all tone languages. During the course of a longitudinal study of my daughter’s acquisition of Mandarin from the earliest stage, I found that by age 20 months (at a stage of single-word utterance and with a very limited inventory of segmental sounds acquired) she could distinguish all five tones in Mandarin, and at age two (around the time when there is a sudden outburst of syntactic activity) she began an interesting play on tones. Her favorite pattern of play was to take any disyllabic word and give it the tonal pattern high-low; in the most interesting instances a monosyllabic word is broken into two syllables by lengthening the vowel with low-high pattern or reduplicating it with high-low pattern. While these instances of word play strengthen the conviction that the child is perfectly conscious of the distinction of tones, they also suggest that pitch level is the most basic and salient feature of tones, and that level tones are the easiest to manipulate, while contour tones are more complex and difficult to master.

语音里的声调，幼儿学说话的时候很早就学会．笔者的女儿二十个月大的时候，虽然只会单字句，发音也只限于很少的声韵．可是能辨别普通话里的五个声调，而且两岁以后开始一种很有意思的声调游戏．双音词不论原来念什么调一律念成高调＋低调；单音词有的时候把母音延长念成低调＋高调的双音词，有的时候重叠成高调＋低调的双音词．这些语言游戏，一方面显示幼儿能有意识地辨别声调，一方面提示音高是声调最基本的特征，平调（ 平声！）最容易操纵，仄调（=升调，降调，升降调，降升调等， 仄声！）比较复杂也难学。

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