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

Abstract

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.

The Relationship Between the Perception and Production of Non-Native Tones

“…Therefore, lower accuracies in T25 and T23 were observed in the identification task. This is consistent with the prediction of the Perceptual Assimilation Model: The discrimination of two non-native tones is poor when they are perceived as belonging to a single native category, but if two non-native tones are perceived to belong to two separate native categories, discrimination is expected to be excellent [20,21]. Mandarin subjects misperceive T33 as T55 which exists in Mandarin, but Cantonese subjects almost never confused T33 with T55; rather, they confused it with T22 which is acoustically closer to T33.…”

An examination of the different ways that non-native phones may be perceptually assimilated as uncategorized

“…To differentiate among focalized, clustered, and dispersed uncategorized responses, t-tests were first conducted comparing the mean percent categorization of an AusE vowel with each EA response option against a chance score of 10%, a value that takes into account the 10 possible EA phonological categories (see So and Best, 2014). For the average percent categorization of a given AusE vowel to an EA response option, a significant p-value (p < 0.05) indicates that a specific EA label was selected significantly more often than chance.…”

Perception of Similar and Dissimilar Lexical Tones by Non‐Tone‐Learning Infants

“…Is it possible that our French‐learning infants processed the Mandarin tonal contrasts by perceptually assimilating them to their native intonations? Assimilation of lexical tones to native intonation categories was examined with English‐ and French‐speaking adults (e.g., Reid et al., ; So & Best, ), but the results were variable, depending on whether the target tone to be assimilated appeared in sentential or single‐syllable contexts. In sentential context, French speakers categorized T1 more as statement (31%) than exclamation (28%) and T4 in the reverse pattern (exclamation 46%, statement 25%) (So & Best, ).…”