BEAL Forum 5. Plenary Session 1.
Date: Friday, 28 October 2022
Time: 9:00- 10:20 am EDT
Venue: Virtual event via Zoom, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
Professor Peggy Pik Ki Mok
Chinese University of Hong Kong
“The Acquisition of Lexical Tone in Various Contexts”
Abstract: More than half of the world’s languages are tone languages, but the acquisition of lexical tone by children is much less well understood compared to the acquisition of consonants and vowels. Early studies show that children have acquired lexical tones by the age of two years, well ahead of their acquisition of segments. Some recent studies revisited tone acquisition in Mandarin and Cantonese and found that tone acquisition is more protracted than previously thought. Besides, many studies demonstrated cross-linguistic influence in bilingual acquisition of segments, but little is known about the acquisition of lexical tone in a bilingual context. Tone sandhi involves higher order, sometimes very complex, phonological alternations of lexical tone, however, children’s acquisition of complex tone sandhi remains largely unexplored. This talk will address the above interesting issues by discussing Cantonese lexical tone acquisition in monolingual and bilingual contexts, and children’s acquisition of the famous tone-sandhi circle in Xiamen Southern Min.
Bio: Professor Peggy Mok received her BA in Chinese Language and Literature from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and her MPhil and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. Her main research interest is phonetics. She works on both speech production and speech perception, particularly with cross-linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. She investigates both segmental and prosodic properties of speech, focusing more on prosodic aspects especially on lexical tone in recent years. Speech acquisition in different contexts is an important theme in her research, with the acquisition of lexical tone being a prominent focus. In addition to theoretical investigation of speech patterns, she is also interested in forensic phonetics, examining how speech patterns are linked to individual speaker identity. Besides phonetics, she is also interested in the bilingual mental lexicon.
Free and Open to the Public
Organizers:
BEAL Forum 5 Organizing Committee
Faculty Co-Chairs: Mineharu Nakayama, Marjorie K.M. Chan, and Zhiguo Xie
Graduate Student Co-Chairs: Jinwei Ye & Wei William Zhou
Committee Members: Paul Cockrum, Skylor Gomes, Ka Fai Law, Yuki Hattori, Shengxiang Lin, Shun Maruyama, Caroline Norfleet, Saori Wakita, Seojin Yang, Xuan Ye, and Yuhong Zhu
Sponsors:
East Asian Studies Center, Graduate Association of Chinese Linguistics (GACL), Graduate Students of East Asian Languages and Literatures (GREALL), Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL), Department of Linguistics, and the Buckeye Language Network (BLN).
This event is sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant for The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center, programming fund for GACL from the Council on Student Affairs, and by the James H-Y. Tai Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Fund.