The Disyllabic Tone Production and Tone Context Effect in Mandarin-speaking Children with Cochlear Implants

This study investigated the production of tones in disyllabic words by Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs). The speech materials consisted of 141 disyllabic and 153 monosyllabic words that were produced by 45 children with CIs. We first compared the accuracy and error patterns of disyllabic tone pairs, and then analyzed the production performance of lexical tones with regard to different contexts and positions. The results showed that: 1) The mean accuracy rate of 20 disyllabic tone pairs was 60.59%, and the tone pairs containing tone 2, tone 3, or tone 5 were produced less correctly by children with CIs. Complex error patterns were found in the present study. 2) The lexical tones had lower accuracy and different error patterns in the first syllable position of disyllable compared with when they were in the second syllable position of disyllable and in the monosyllable. Among the four lexical tones, tone 2 and tone 3 were more affected by the contexts and positions. This study sheds light on tone acquisition of the disyllabic words for children with CIs.