CL-Child Corpus: The Phonological Development of Putonghua in Children from Dialect-Speaking Regions

The phonological development of Putonghua in children from dialect-speaking regions requires comprehensive investigation using large-scale empirical data. This study presents the CL-CHILD, a speech corpus designed to examine the phonological development of Putonghua in preschool children exposed to a bidialectal environment of Changlitown dialect and Putonghua. The corpus includes 27 monosyllabic words and 33 disyllabic words representing child-friendly objects. The data were collected though a picture-naming task, and detailed annotation were subsequently performed. Data from 139 children were further analyzed. The results reveal that, compared to monodialectal Putonghua-speaking children in Beijing, the phonological development of initials and finals exhibits similar patterns, while tone development differs significantly due to the influence of dialect exposure. The corpus holds potential applications for further studies in child speech acquisition.