An Analysis of Tonal Characteristics in Pre-school Children's Word Utterance

This study is to investigate the characteristic of tonal elements in word utterance of 30 pre-school children. For the analyses, 240 utterances of 4 syllable words were processed to extract acoustic values and then the data was transformed into tonal height in order to examine the contour. The results show that the mean pitch of a note is and high and low pitched notes are and . The pitch patterns of the 4 syllables measured at the frication and aspiration portion are and F4-E4-B3-A3. The pitch patterns of consonant clusters are and . The analyses of tonal elements in this study provide evidentiary data on tonal height helpful for developing melodic contour.