Cross-language categorization of monosyllabic foreign tones: effects of phonological and phonetic properties of native language<sup>*</sup>

Stolz, Thomas; Nau, Nicole; Stroh, Cornelia

doi:10.1524/9783050060354.55

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Derived from PAM, PAM-S predicts non-native tone discrimination based on perceptual assimilation patterns (So, 2010(So, , 2012So & Best, 2008. As F0 marks both tones and sentence intonation (Ladefoged, 2006), tonal listeners can map non-native tones onto their L1 tonal categories, and non-tonal listeners can map nonnative tones onto to their L1 sentence intonation categories (So & Best, 2014;cf.…”

Section: Pam For Suprasegmentalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By contrast, PAM-S posits that how a person assimilates (or not) each member of a tone contrast into a L1 tonal/intonational category determines their perceptual patterns (So & Best, 2010. Findings from simple discrimination and identification tasks largely undergird these theoretical accounts (Francis et al, 2008;So, 2010So, , 2012So & Best, 2008, though the simplicity of these tasks limits their implications, especially as speech perception entails not only basic perceptual processes but also advanced ones (Choi, 2020;Correia et al, 2015;Dupoux et al, 2010). To address this research gap, this study investigates whether FWP or PAM-S also applies to more complex perceptual operations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why Aren’t All Cantonese Tones Equally Confusing to English Listeners?

Choi

Chiu

2022

Lang Speech

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English listeners often struggle to perceive tones, but some are easier than others. This study examined these phenomena grounded in the feature weighing perspective (FWP) and the Perceptual Assimilation Model for Suprasegmentals (PAM-S). Forty-seven English and Cantonese listeners completed 4,212 trials of Cantonese tone discrimination and sequence recall tasks. The English listeners showed asymmetrical perceptual patterns of discrimination but not sequence recall. Specifically, these English listeners discriminated T1–T5, T3–T5, and T4–T5 more accurately than T1–T4, T3–T4, and T1–T3. However, they recalled the contour tone and level tone sequences with similar accuracies. Results of the discrimination task aligned with the predictions of PAM-S but not FWP. However, results of the sequence recall task did not support PAM-S. Together, these results suggest that PAM-S only applies to simple discrimination, not abstract phonological processing with a high memory load.

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Section: Pam For Suprasegmentalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Aren’t All Cantonese Tones Equally Confusing to English Listeners?

Choi

Chiu

2022

Lang Speech

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Phonetic Influences on English and French Listeners’ Assimilation of Mandarin Tones to Native Prosodic Categories

Best

2014

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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107

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This study examined how native speakers of Australian English and French, nontone languages with different lexical stress properties, perceived Mandarin tones in a sentence environment according to their native sentence intonation categories (i-Categories) in connected speech. Results showed that both English and French speakers categorized Mandarin tones primarily on the phonetic similarities of the pitch contours between the Mandarin tones and their native i-Categories. Moreover, French but not English speakers were able to detect the fine-detailed phonetic differences between Tone 3 (T3) and Tone 4 (T4; i.e., low or low-falling tone vs. high-falling tone), which suggests that the stress differences between these languages may affect nonnative tone perception: English uses lexical stress, whereas French does not. In the discrimination task, the French listeners’ performance was better than that of the English listeners. For each group, discrimination of the Tone 1 (T1)–T4 and Tone 2 (T2)–T3 pairs was consistently and significantly lower than that of the other tone pairs, and the difference between T1-T4 and T2-T3 was significant. Discrimination of the Mandarin tone pairs was not fully predicted by pairwise categorizations to native i-Categories, however. Some discrimination differences were observed among tone pairs showing the same assimilation patterns. Phonetic overlaps in native i-Category choices for the Mandarin tones, strength of categorization (So, 2012), and tonal coarticulation effects (Xu, 1994, 1997) may offer possible accounts of these discrepancies between categorization and discrimination performance. These findings support the perceptual assimilation model for suprasegmentals (So & Best, 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2013), extended to categorization of nonnative tone words within sentence contexts to native i-Categories.

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Second Language Perception of Mandarin Vowels and Tones

Hao

2017

Lang Speech

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This study examines the discrimination of Mandarin vowels and tones by native English speakers with varying amounts of Mandarin experience, aiming to investigate the relative difficulty of these two types of sounds for English speakers at different learning stages, and the source of their difficulty. Seventeen advanced learners of Mandarin (Ex group), eighteen beginning learners (InEx group), and eighteen English speakers naïve to Mandarin (Naïve group) participated in an AXB discrimination task. The stimuli were two Mandarin vowel contrasts, /li-ly/ and /lu-ly/, and two tonal contrasts, T1-T4 and T2-T3. The predicted difficulty for each contrast was hypothesized based on the assimilation of these sounds to English reported in previous work. The results showed that the Naïve group was more accurate with vowel contrasts than with tones, suggesting that non-tonal language speakers without any Mandarin training are less sensitive to tonal distinction than to vowels. The two learner groups, on the other hand, were highly accurate with all contrasts except for the T2-T3 pair, and achieved significantly higher accuracy than the Naïve group on /li-ly/ and T1-T4. This lends support to the view that experience in Mandarin improves English speakers' sensitivity to tonal distinction, helping them discriminate some tones as accurately as vowels. However, all three groups achieved low accuracy in discriminating T2 and T3, suggesting that this contrast may be inherently difficult and resistant to improvement. This study shows that various factors in addition to the native language experience may affect the perception of non-native vowels and tones.

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Cross-language categorization of monosyllabic foreign tones: effects of phonological and phonetic properties of native language^*

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Why Aren’t All Cantonese Tones Equally Confusing to English Listeners?

Why Aren’t All Cantonese Tones Equally Confusing to English Listeners?

Phonetic Influences on English and French Listeners’ Assimilation of Mandarin Tones to Native Prosodic Categories

Second Language Perception of Mandarin Vowels and Tones

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Cross-language categorization of monosyllabic foreign tones: effects of phonological and phonetic properties of native language*

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Why Aren’t All Cantonese Tones Equally Confusing to English Listeners?

Why Aren’t All Cantonese Tones Equally Confusing to English Listeners?

Phonetic Influences on English and French Listeners’ Assimilation of Mandarin Tones to Native Prosodic Categories

Second Language Perception of Mandarin Vowels and Tones

Contact Info

Product

Resources

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Cross-language categorization of monosyllabic foreign tones: effects of phonological and phonetic properties of native language^*