Cross-language Perception of Non-native Tonal Contrasts: Effects of Native Phonological and Phonetic Influences

Abstract

This study examined the perception of the four Mandarin lexical tones by Mandarin-naïve Hong Kong Cantonese, Japanese, and Canadian English listener groups. Their performance on an identification task, following a brief familiarization task, was analyzed in terms of tonal sensitivities (A-prime scores on correct identifications) and tonal errors (confusions). The A-prime results revealed that the English listeners' sensitivity to Tone 4 identifications specifically was significantly lower than that of the other two groups. The analysis of tonal errors revealed that all listener groups showed perceptual confusion of tone pairs with similar phonetic features (T1-T2, T1-T4 and T2-T3 pairs), but not of those with completely dissimilar features (T1-T3, T2-T4, and T3-T4). Language specific errors were also observed in their performance, which may be explained within the framework of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM: Best, 1995;Best & Tyler, 2007). The findings imply that linguistic experience with native tones does not necessarily facilitate non-native tone perception. Rather, the phonemic status and the phonetic features (similarities or dissimilarities) between the tonal systems of the target language and the listeners' native languages play critical roles in the perception of non-native tones.

Cross-domain correlation in pitch perception, the influence of native language

“…Other studies have also found highly accurate identification of Chinese lexical tones by non-tone language listeners (e.g. Burnham et al, 1996;Burnham et al, 2015;So & Best, 2010). If the tasks had been more complicated and involved more linguistic content (e.g.…”

Discrimination of Cantonese Tones by Speakers of Tone and Non-tone Languages

“…While T2 and T3 both have a rising pitch contour, T1 and T4 both start with a high pitch (Howie, 1976). So (2010) found an asymmetrical pattern, which was shared by speakers of tone language (Cantonese) and non-tone languages (Japanese and English). All the listeners found the T2-T3 and T1-T4 pairs more confusable than the other pairs in an identification task.…”

Effects of linguistic experience on the perception of high-variability non-native tones

“…In addition to comparing tone perception by speakers of a tone language and a non-tone language, researchers have further explored whether speakers of a tone language have an advantage over non-tone language speakers in perceiving tonal contrasts in a different tone language, but the findings were mixed. While some studies reported that tone speakers outperformed non-tone speakers in non-native tone perception (Liang and van Heuven, 2007;Wayland and Guion, 2004), others found no significant performance difference between the two groups Hao, 2012;So and Best, 2010). Yet other researchers have found selective advantages of tone language experience in the perception of non-native tones (Lee et al, 1996;Qin and Jongman, 2015;Qin and Mok, 2011).…”

“…In a tone recognition task, speaker normalization is required when the stimuli presented are from multiple speakers (So and Best, 2010;Wayland and Guion, 2004) but not when all the stimuli come from a single speaker (used in most of the aforementioned studies); furthermore, when speaker normalization is indeed required, it may be facilitated by presenting the tone stimuli in context Hao, 2012;Liang and van Heuven, 2007) as opposed to presenting the tones in isolation (as in most of the aforementioned studies). To our knowledge, Lee et al (2009) is the only available study that systematically compares native tone listeners' and non-tone listeners' perception of tones produced by single vs multiple speakers and tones presented in isolation vs in context.…”