Chapter 1 Introduction 1
1.1 Purpose of the Study 1
1.2 Research Questions 4
1.3 Outline of the Book 5
Chapter 2 Literature Review 6
2.1 Major Theories Concerning Child L1 Development 6
2.2 Previous Studies on Segmental Acquisition by Children 19
2.3 Previous Studies on Tone Acquisition in Children 26
2.4 Summary 33
Chapter 3 Methodology 34
3.1 Subject 34
3.2 Data Collection 34
3.3 Data Extraction 37
3.4 Measure of Utterances,Babble,and Words 38
3.5 Measure of MLU 39
3.6 Calculation of Percentage of Consonants and Vowels 39
3.7 Acoustic Analysis of Vowels and Consonants Across the Four Stages 42
3.8 Measurement of Tones 45
3.9 Statistical Analysis 46
Chapter 4 Segmental Development：Results 47
4.1 Early and Late Babble 47
4.2 Late Babble and Early Words 72
4.3 Late Babble and Early Speech Development 87
4.4 Acoustic Study of Vowels and Consonants Across the Four Stages 96
4.5 Summary 117
Chapter 5 Tonal Development：Results 119
5.1 Mean F0 and Accent Range 119
5.2 Direction of F0 Changes 121
5.3 Summary 124
Chapter 6 Discussion 127
6.1 Linguistic Evidence in Support of the Continuity View 127
6.2 Acoustic Evidence in Support of the Continuity View 154
6.3 The Underlying Operators Driving the Similarity of Babble and Early Speech 163
6.4 Early Development of Mandarin Tones 169
6.5 Summary 174
Chapter 7 Conclusion 176
7.1 Linguistic and Acoustic Evidence in Support of the Continuity View 176
7.2 Limitations of the Study 180
7.3 Directions for Future Research 180
References 181