When is a phonological rule acquired? A look at children’s production on syllable-final nasals in Taiwan Mandarin

Syllable-final nasals, /n/ and /N/, tend to be merged when they are after /i/ and ■ in Taiwan Mandarin, but in different directions. For /i/, /n/ is merged with /N/, while for ■, /N/ is merged with /n/ (Chen, 1991; Tse, 1992; Hsu, 2005). This study thus aims to examine whether children in Taiwan merge syllable-final nasals in Mandarin the way adults do. Fifty Grade-2 and Grade-6 students would read monosyllabic words, containing 3 [vowels (/i/, ■, /a/)] ×4 (tones) =12 minimal pairs differing only in nasal endings. They would repeat the words twice, once in Zhuyinfuhao, a local phonetic system, and once in traditional Chinese characters. Preliminary results indicated that Grade-2 children treated the /eN/ words very similarly to adults, although the occurrences of nasal merge were less frequent in the Zhuyinfuhao set than in the character set. For vowel /i/, however, merging of both directions could be found in both Mandarin characters and Zhuyinfuhao.