The four tones of Mandarin Chinese

Jeroen van de Weijer, Marjoleine Sloos
2014 Linguistics in the Netherlands  
In this paper we discuss the four tones of Standard (Beijing) Mandarin Chinese. First, we will suggest a proposal for their phonological representation. Then, we discuss the order in which they are acquired in first language acquisition, relating this both to the representations we propose and to the relative frequency with which these tones appear in the most frequently used Chinese words. It turns out that the former predicts the order of acquisition more closely than the latter: We provide
more » ... explanation for this based on the early stage at which the tones are acquired.
doi:10.1075/avt.31.13wei fatcat:4fl6gkhvbnb5hkxnld2bdgjglm