Phonetic Development of Chinese Infants

Six Chinese infants were under observation. A tape recorder was used to record the sounds of the infants. The appearance of sequences of consonants and vowels are listed. The mispronunced consonants are pointed out and discussed. Aspirated /p, t, k, ts/ were difficult for young children to produce; they were pronunced as unaspirated. Lewis in his book Infant Speech (1936; pages 26-37) provided unique explanation on the phonetic aspect of infant speech. Stern and Stern in their book Die Kinder-sprache (1928) made detailed descriptions and classifications on the phonetic and word development of their own children. Investigating the child's language from the developmental point of view is a traditional approach. Studies on the phonetic development of infants help to understand the processes of a child's acquiring his language, for phoneme is the basic unit of language.