A Comparison of Mandarin-speaking Children's Pitch at the Pre-linguistic and Early Speech Stages

The paper studies the prosodic development of 9 Mandarin infants (5 males and 4 females) in Changsha through the acoustic and statistic analysis of the infants’ data from their pre-linguistic and early speech stages. After the analysis, following results have been obtained: 1) the level and simple prosodic patterns are highly frequent in the infants’ prosodic production for the two stages. Furthermore, the infants all prefer the production of high relative pitch. There are similarities as well as differences in the prosodic production between the two age groups. Certain universal characteristics could be observed in comparing the data with those of other language communities; 2) development continuity can be observed between the two age groups in prosodic development; 3) obvious evidence for language-specific effects can be found in both pre-linguistic and early speech stages.