Age-Related Differences of Mandarin Tone and Consonant Aspiration Perception in Babble Noise

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigated the categorical perception of Mandarin tones and consonant aspiration contrasts in babble noise among adults and adolescents aged 12–14 years, and explored the association between working memory and categorical perception. Method: Twenty-four adults and 20 adolescents with Mandarin as their native language were recruited. Their performances of phonemic identification and discrimination in babble noise and quiet conditions, digit span tasks, and nonword repetition were assessed. Results: Results indicated that, firstly, in the noise condition, both adults and adolescents showed wider boundary widths and lower between-category accuracies when perceiving aspiration of consonants than in the quiet condition, and the categorical boundary of tone perception in adolescents showed a transitional tendency toward Tone 1. Secondly, discrimination of consonant aspiration in adolescents needed to be further developed. Lastly, the accuracy of nonword repetition in adolescents was lower than that in adults, and adults with better auditory verbal working memory had better performance on tone perception. Conclusions: Our results provided evidence that tone perception is acquired easier than consonant aspiration perception, and tone perception is more robust and less susceptible to noise interference. Categorical perception performance relates to the capacity and utilization of auditory verbal working memory in some ways.

Hearing with two pairs of ears: Simultaneous bilingual children show language-specific phoneme perception for /b/ and /p/ in English and Mandarin Chinese

“…In general, our findings of gradual developmental change in phoneme perception align with previous studies on phoneme perception in tonal and non-tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin, English, Spanish, French), where age-related differences have been observed in identification and discrimination for consonant contrasts by children aged 6 to 12 as compared to adolescents and adults (Feng & Peng, 2023;Flege & Eefting, 1986;Hazan & Barrett, 2000;Medina et al, 2010;Meng et al, 2022;Sussman, 1993). This is the first study to investigate phoneme perception in two languages using a lexical identification task for English/Mandarin bilingual children of early school age.…”

“…For example, in one phoneme perception study for the /ba/-/da/ contrast, 5-to 6-year-old English speaking children (N=10) showed less mature phoneme identification functions than English speaking adults (N=10) (Sussman, 1993), and in a study of four consonant contrasts (/ɡ/-/k/, /d/-/ɡ/, /s/-/z/ and /s/-/ʃ/) gradual refinement of the steepness of the identification function for monolingual English speakers was observed for children (N= 84) across the age range of 6-12 years, with even further refinement for a comparison group of adults (N=13) (Hazan & Barrett, 2000). The upper bound of phoneme perception development seems to fall somewhere in the teenage years, as shown by one recent study of Mandarin speakers (Meng et al, 2022), in which adolescents aged 12-14 years (N=20) exhibited perceptual thresholds and identification functions that did not differ from those of adults (N=24). In addition, some studies of the /d/ -/t/ contrast have reported age-related differences in both the threshold and the slope of the identification function (Flege & Eefting, 1986), while others report only age-related differences in the steepness of the slope (Medina et al, 2010) -differences which may be due to different acoustic properties of the phonemes in the test languages (English and Spanish, versus French, respectively).…”

“…Phonological perception of speech sounds in spoken languages is shaped by linguistic experience from infancy (Kuhl et al, 1992;Werker & Tees, 1984), and perception continues to develop through adolescence into early adulthood (Feng & Peng, 2023;Flege & Eefting, 1986;Hazan & Barrett, 2000;Medina et al, 2010;Meng et al, 2022;Sussman, 1993). However, exposure to two languages from birth, with dual phonological systems and lexicons, can result in different pathways to language development for bilingual children (Hoff et al, 2012), including bi-/ or multilingual phoneme development (Sebastian-Galles & Santolin, 2020).…”