After English, Mandarin is the most widely used language by young children in Canberra.
Mandarin is the term used in English to refer to a number Chinese varieties spoken in northern and southwestern China, and the standardised varieties taught in schools across mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Historically, many different languages have been used across China, some related to each other and some unrelated, as shown on the map below. Mandarin varieties have been spoked across northern China, and southwestern China.
Image source: Wu Yue, Gohu1er, and Kanguole via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
A standardised variety of the Mandarin spoken in the Beijing region is the official language of China, and the de facto official language of Taiwan. It is prescribed as the language of education, and most media and government services. Children growing up across mainland China and Taiwan will begin to learn this variety at school, even if they have used a different variety or language at home.
- In mainland China the standard variety is known as Putonghua, and some of the research on speech and language development conducted with participants from mainland China uses this term. Children are taught to read and write simplified Chinese characters, and also use the pinyin system when needing to write in Latin characters.
- In Taiwan the standard variety is known as Guoyu, and it is similar to the Putonghua of mainland China. Children are taught to read and write traditional Chinese characters, and to use a system of phonetic characters called Zhuyin.
- In Singapore, (standardised) Mandarin is one of the four official languages, and is the language of Chinese language classes in schools. While most education today is in English, Chinese Singaporean students also learn Mandarin, and the simplified Chinese writing system, at school, even if they have grown up using a different Chinese language at home.
- In Malaysia, Chinese Malaysian students may grow up using one or more Chinese languages at home, but will be taught (standardised) Mandarin and simplified Chinese characters in Chinese-medium schools and Chinese language classes.
From my experience in Canberra, families may nominate ‘Mandarin’ as the language used at home if the parents have been through one of these education systems, and are comfortable using Mandarin and/or the simplified Chinese writing system as one of their languages.
The family may be able to access services and supports in Mandarin, but sometimes another Chinese language is used as well as, or instead of, Mandarin within daily interactions at home. The information we might need to identify a potential speech or language disorder may be somewhat different from the information that may support a family to access services.
In the past I have tried to probe this through interview and observation, but Yang & Resendiz (2024) include a parent questionnaire to help elicit some of this information, and I am looking forward to trying this out (their article is available to ASHA SIG members).
Mandarin language resources
Some general resources that may be helpful references for understanding Mandarin speech and language include:
- Glottolog (Hammarström et al., 2024) provides a bibliographical database for resources about the language: https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/mand1415
- grambank (Skirgård et al., 2023) catalogues a variety of structural features of the language: https://grambank.clld.org/languages/mand1415
- PHOIBLE (Moran & McCloy, 2019) catalogues the phonological inventory of the language: https://phoible.org/languages/mand1415
- CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) contains corpora (collections of transcriptions) of language samples collected in studies of typical and atypical language development: https://childes.talkbank.org/access/Chinese/
Studies of typical development
When I searched Scopus for hits for ‘Mandarin’ or ‘Putonghua’ from a list of journals that publish in the areas of language acquisition, language processing, and/or language disorders, I got 1610 hits: Mandarin is a relatively well studied language!
I can’t hope to cover even a fraction of those, but here are a couple of highlights that have been helpful to me, and will hopefully be helpful for other clinicians working with children exposed to Mandarin at home:
- Li & To (2017) provides a review of studies of Mandarin speech sound acquisition. The authors include studies published both in English and in Chinese languages, and also provide a helpful discussion of different systems that have been used to transcribe and describe Mandarin children’s speech production. The paper is available to ASHA members, or to SPA members via CINAHL.
- McLeod (2024a)’s Multilingual Children’s Speech website includes details of a number of studies of Mandarin speech sound acquisition (listed under ‘Mandarin’ in the database).
- Yu (2016) provides an insightful perspective into how one Taiwanese Mandarin-speaking family describe their home language practices, and how this same family draw on different linguistic codes within their daily interactions at home. This is one of my favourite papers for considering what multilingualism means to a family, and how this plays out in ways that are important to consider in clinical practice. The paper is available via CINAHL.
Studies of communication disorders
Again, there is a relatively large body of research in this area. For a recent highlight that may be helpful for other clinicians:
- Sheng et al. (2023) review studies on the nature of developmental language disorder (DLD) in Chinese languages. The authors included studies published in both English and in Chinese languages. While some studies in the review investigated Mandarin specifically, other studies investigated Cantonese. As Mandarin and Cantonese are both isolating languages (with no noun or verb inflections), understanding how DLD manifests in these languages can help us understand DLD beyond the difficulties with inflectional morphology that are salient, but are probably the tip of the iceberg, in English. The paper is available via CINAHL.
Assessment tools
A number of standardised language assessments also exist for Mandarin, but these are outside the scope of what I will cover here (which I think will be more useful for clinicians working in multilingual contexts).
Communicative development inventories
There are CDIs available for Mandarin. Norms for these tools were collected in Beijing and across Taiwan, so do not apply to Mandarin-speaking children growing up in Australia or elsewhere.
Remember that tests don’t diagnose; clinician’s diagnose. With those provisos out of the way, I do find these helpful as a way to start a conversation with caregivers about what words their young child may be using:
- Tardif & Fletcher (2008) have CDIs for Beijing Mandarin (and Hong Kong Cantonese). The complete manual (including the forms) is available to download from https://hdl.handle.net/10468/9440
- Liu & Tsao (2010) have CDIs for Taiwanese Mandarin. I haven’t accessed or used these ones. They are available to purchase from (the Taiwanese retailer): https://www.psy.com.tw/ec99/ushop20128/GoodsDescr.asp?category_id=165&parent_id=118&prod_id=88190
Assessing speech production
McLeod et al. (2017) (open access)’s tutorial is always a helpful place to start in terms of assessing speech production in another language. I’ve also written a little about it on my blog here.
There are also several helpful resources available that are specific to Mandarin:
- Yang & Resendiz (2024) have a tutorial specifically on assessing speech production in Mandarin-English bilingual children (living in the United States). I particularly like the way they talk through the clinical reasoning process, and also discuss the likelihood that children may also be exposed to other Chinese varieties other than Mandarin. Their paper is available to ASHA SIG members, or SPA members via CINAHL.
- Hua & Dodd (2000) have a (now somewhat older) study of speech acquisition in Putonghua. The authors helpfully list the stimuli they used in their single word production task, which I found to be a helpful start in working with families to try to identify appropriate stimuli. The paper is available via CINAHL, or possibly via a dodgy-looking Russian website that I was too afraid to click on (try Google).
- Bernhardt & Stemberger (2020) have a number of resources available that may be helpful for clinicians working within a constraint-based nonlinear phonology (e.g. optimality theory) framework. These are available to download from their website: https://phonodevelopment.sites.olt.ubc.ca/
- McLeod et al. (2012) have simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese adaptations of their Intelligibility in Context Scale available on their website, both under ‘Chinese’: https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/ics
- McLeod (2024b)’s Multilingual Children’s Speech website also lists a number of published speech production assessments for Mandarin (listed under ‘Mandarin’ in the database).
Nonword repetition tasks
I haven’t seen as much on nonword repetition in Mandarin, but it’s an interesting question.
- Xue et al. (2023) report a recent study that explored the types of difficulties that Mandarin-speaking children with DLD had with nonword repetition tasks. The paper is available via CINAHL.
- Crowley (2021)’s LEADERS Project website also has a nonword repetition task available for Mandarin, under ‘disability evaluations’ -> ‘nonword repetition’.
Sentence repetition tasks
Similarly, I have only found one study that has looked at sentence repetition in the context of DLD in Mandarin:
- Wang et al. (2022) is a recent study using a sentence repetition task that aimed to probe for the language difficulties commonly seen in DLD in Mandarin. The authors also (helpfully!) included their stimuli in the appendix of the paper, which may be a helpful starting point for clinicians working with similar tasks. The paper is available via ASHA, or the Wayback Machine.