The phonological acquisition of Putonghua (Modern Standard Chinese)

The phonological acquisition of 129 monolingual Putonghua-speaking children , aged 1;6 to 4;6, is described. Putonghua (Modern Standard Chinese) syllab les have four possible elements: tone, syllable-initial consonant, vowel, a nd syllable-final consonant. The children's errors suggested that Putonghua -speaking children mastered these elements in the following order: tones we re acquired first; then syllable-final consonants and vowels; and syllable- initial consonants were acquired last. Phonetic acquisition of the 21 sylla ble-initial consonants was complete by 3;6 for 75 % of children. By 4;6 the children were using the syllable-initial consonants correctly on two third s of occasions (with the exception of four affricates). Simple vowels emerg ed early in development. However, triphthongs and diphthongs were prone to systematic errors. Tone errors were rare, perhaps because of their role in distinguishing lexical meaning. In contrast, acquisition of 'weak stress' a nd 'rhotacized feature' was incomplete in the oldest children assessed. Pho nological processes used by the children were identified. Two of these proc esses, syllable-initial consonant: deletion and backing, would be considere d atypical error patterns in English. Existing theories of phonological acq uisition (e.g. concepts of markedness, functional load, feature hierarchies ) cannot: account for some of the patterns revealed, A satisfactory explana tion of the findings requires more attention to the specific characteristic s of the linguistic system the children are learning. It is proposed that t he saliency of the components in the language system determines the order o f acquisition.