One Way or Another: Evidence for Perceptual Asymmetry in Pre-attentive Learning of Non-native Contrasts

Abstract

Research investigating listeners’ neural sensitivity to speech sounds has largely focused on segmental features. We examined Australian English listeners’ perception and learning of a supra-segmental feature, pitch direction in a non-native tonal contrast, using a passive oddball paradigm and electroencephalography. The stimuli were two contours generated from naturally produced high-level and high-falling tones in Mandarin Chinese, differing only in pitch direction (Liu and Kager, 2014). While both contours had similar pitch onsets, the pitch offset of the falling contour was lower than that of the level one. The contrast was presented in two orientations (standard and deviant reversed) and tested in two blocks with the order of block presentation counterbalanced. Mismatch negativity (MMN) responses showed that listeners discriminated the non-native tonal contrast only in the second block, reflecting indications of learning through exposure during the first block. In addition, listeners showed a later MMN peak for their second block of test relative to listeners who did the same block first, suggesting linguistic (as opposed to acoustic) processing or a misapplication of perceptual strategies from the first to the second block. The results also showed a perceptual asymmetry for change in pitch direction: listeners who encountered a falling tone deviant in the first block had larger frontal MMN amplitudes than listeners who encountered a level tone deviant in the first block. The implications of our findings for second language speech and the developmental trajectory for tone perception are discussed.

The Diversity of Tone Languages and the Roles of Pitch Variation in Non-tone Languages: Considerations for Tone Perception Research

“…But only some languages also make use of lexical tones , contrastive sub-syllabic fundamental frequency (pitch) variations referred to as tonemes (e.g., Jones, 1944), which for those languages comprise a third class of phonemic elements. Perceptual researchers often assume tones to be suprasegmental (e.g., So and Best, 2010, 2011, 2014; Liu et al, 2018; Poltrock et al, 2018), i.e., to extend across the consonants and vowels of the target syllable. While in a phonetic sense tones extend across the voiced segments of a syllable, however, such observations may not straightforwardly reflect the more abstract phonological properties of tones (e.g., see Wang, 1967; Hyman, 2011a,b).…”

Electrophysiological Signatures of Perceiving Alternated Tone in Mandarin Chinese: Mismatch Negativity to Underlying Tone Conflict

“…This means that the brain does not wait until S2 is fully recognized before it starts to entertain the possibility of parsing S1 as an underlying T3. Pre-attentive learning and the development of expectations (Bendixen et al, 2012 ; Liu et al, 2018 ) in an MMN experiment with repeated exposure might explain the early onset of the UR Relation effect as well. After all, participants heard only two lexical items in one sub-block, and there were only four lexical items in our experiment (see the Methods section).…”

Early differentiation of memory retrieval processes for newly learned voices and phonemes as indexed by the MMN

“…Different studies attempted to capture the effect of passive exposure on auditory change detection mechanisms. Studies with word stimuli showed that passive exposure may lead to enhanced MMN for novel tonal contrasts or tonal word-forms within a single experimental session (Liu, Ong, Tuninetti, & Escudero, 2018;Yue, Bastiaanse, & Alter, 2014).…”