Wednesday October 8, 2008
It’s all in the tone
By WONG LI ZA
Proficiency in language, speech development and speech perception are linked to understanding how infants learn and perceive tone.
UNDERSTANDING how infants learn language tones may hold the answer to problems like speech delay, dyspraxia and even autism in children.
A pioneer researcher in this subject, Dr Karen Mattock said to date, there has been much research on how infants and toddlers pick up consonants and vowels, but limited research on how infants learn tones.
»Babies at birth have the ability to perceive any language« DR KAREN MATTOCK English and French are non-tonal languages while Cantonese, Mandarin and Thai are examples of tonal languages.
Mattock was here recently to give a talk on How Infants Begin to Understand Language Tones at the Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah Distinguished Speakers Series at Sunway University College, Petaling Jaya.
At the talk, she said that at birth, babies have remarkable speech perception abilities and also recognise their native language over a foreign one.
Speech perception refers to how humans interpret and understand sounds in languages. It is related to the ability to hear the difference between similar consonant sounds like “ge” and “de”.
“Specifically, babies at birth have the ability to perceive any language but as they grow older, they only tune in to the ones they were most exposed to,” said Mattock, who holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Western Sydney.
In 2006, together with her colleague Dennis Burnham, Mattock completed a four-year study that involved 48 English-speaking and 48 Mandarin- or Cantonese-speaking infants aged six to nine months.
The study was conducted at the University of Hong Kong and University of Western Sydney. Findings indicated that the linguistic environment influences tone perception and that perception of tone in speech and music contexts is different.
“A six-month-old English speaking baby can tell the difference between lexical tones but by nine months, lose that ability because she has had more knowledge of the (English) language and therefore, does not attend to tones the same way,” said Mattock, a Research Council UK Fellow in Psychology at Lancaster University, Britain.
(Lexical tone is the distinctive pitch level carried by the syllable of a word which differentiates the meaning of that word. Lexical tones are present in tonal languages.)
“However, the opposite was found of the other group of babies, who could tell the difference at both six and nine months,” she said.
This finding is important because proficiency in language, speech development and speech perception are linked to understanding how infants learn and perceive tone.
“Generally, if a child has better speech perception at nine months, she may show better word-learning abilities and become more verbal at 18 months, especially for words which sound alike.
“If a child cannot clearly distinguish between such sounds, she may face some difficulty in learning names of objects, speech formation and vocabulary development later on,” said Mattock, an Australian native.
Over half of the world’s population speak a tone language and over 70% of languages in the world are tonal.
To a question whether children should be exposed to more than one language at a time, Mattock replied that the younger a child is exposed to multiple languages, the faster her speech is likely to develop and the more likely she will be native in those languages.
Will a multi-lingual environment confuse a child?
“Within the first year, a bilingual child can differentiate between two languages but she may be a little slower in grasping both languages.
“However, this delay may be just a matter of a few months, which is not significant,” said Mattock, who plans to work with Sunway University College to conduct a study involving infants exposed to both tonal and non-tonal languages.”
Source:
RSS
