An Acoustic-Based Contrastive Study on the Pitch Changes between Infants Speaking Chinese and Tibetan

Pitches of infants demonstrate different changing characteristics under the environment of various languages. Focusing on pitch changes of infants growing up in the Mandarin Chinese and Amdo Tibetan environment, this paper elaborates based on analysis that these two groups of infants share some similar changing patterns, such as pitch rising after a long period of the level tone. However, there still appear several differences in regard of types of pitch change. Pitches of the infant growing up in the Mandarin Chinese environment displays five changing types, the level tone, the rising tone, the tortuous tone, the falling tone and the complex tone, while the infant growing up in the Amdo Tibetan environment experiences only four types of changes, the falling tone, the level tone, the rising tone and the complex tone, and has no model of tone falling before tone rising. Furthermore, the study finds that the first pitch change that infants can acquire is the falling tone, which is due to the immature of their vocal organs as well as that they are not yet familiar with pronunciations.