Bilingual students’ Mandarin tone productions (Lin et al., 2025)

Purpose: This study investigates how Mandarin–English bilingual students in Canada produce Mandarin tones and how this is influenced by factors such as tone complexity, cross-linguistic influences, and speech input.

Method: Participants were 82 students enrolled in a Chinese bilingual program in Western Canada. Students were recruited from Grades 1, 3, and 5 and divided into two groups based on their home language backgrounds: The heritage language group had early and strong input in Mandarin, and the second language (L2) group received mostly English input at home. Single-word tone productions were audio-recorded and transcribed by Mandarin-native listeners for match (accuracy) and pattern analyses. Acoustic measurements were extracted to provide phonetic details.

Results: First, Tone3 (dipping tone) was challenging across groups due to its complexity. Second, L2 students’ productions were more influenced by English as a nontonal language and showed signs of categorical confusion. Third, increased tone match rates were related to both home input and school input, but bilingual students did not reach more than 90% of match rates in Grade 5. Instead, L2 students produced phonetic features less accurately in higher grades. This was attributed to reduced pronunciation instruction and limited home input.

Conclusions: Bilingual students’ speech development in a minority language indicates unique influences of home and school input but also the universal influences of tone complexity. This study provides evidence for bilingual speech theories in the suprasegmental domain and has implications for the pedagogy of a minority language in the context of bilingual education.

Supplemental Material S1. Mean duration of tone productions in each subgroup to convert equal normalized durations to differentiated normalized durations.

Supplemental Material S2. Details of the selected optimal logistic mixed model for tone match.

Supplemental Material S3. Details of the selected optimal GAMM for F0 contours.

Supplemental Material S4. Details of the selected optimal linear mixed model for tone duration.

Lin, Y., Pollock, K. E., & Li, F. (2025). Speech production of Mandarin lexical tones among Canadian elementary students enrolled in Mandarin–English bilingual schools. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 68(2), 435–455. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00150