Second Language Perception of Mandarin Vowels and Tones

Abstract

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.

Statistical Regularities Affect the Perception of Second Language Speech: Evidence From Adult Classroom Learners of Mandarin Chinese

“…On the surface it appeared that adult L2 Mandarin learners had made little progress in their tone perception and spoken word recognition despite 10–12 weeks of additional explicit classroom learning. This finding corroborates prior evidence that beginner and intermediate L2 learners’ perception and production of tone is often resistant to improvement and much less accurate than that of native listeners (e.g., Hao, , , ; Shen, ; Wiener, ; Yang, ; Yang & Chan, ).…”

“…Mean tone identification accuracy was calculated at gate 8, which corresponded to the full acoustic signal. This served as a measure of tone categorization accuracy (irrespective of the co‐occurring segments) similar to previous L2 tone perception studies (e.g., Hao , , ; Wang et al., ). Because our stimuli did not control the sonority of the syllable onset, we do not examine tone accuracy at early gates or between tone type accuracy (cf.…”

“…For example, as shown in Figure , the syllable mai can mean “to sell” when produced with a falling F0 ( mai4 ) or “to buy” when produced with a low‐dipping F0 ( mai3 ). Even after several years of classroom learning, many L1 English–L2 Mandarin learners still struggle to distinguish between tones that share overlapping F0 starting points (Hao, , ). For instance, Figure shows that tones 2 and 3 have a similar low onset F0, whereas tones 1 and 4 have a similar high onset F0 (Gottfried & Suiter, ; Shen & Lin, ).…”

Effects of native language experience on Mandarin lexical tone processing in proficient second language learners

“…Unlike in English, correct perception of the phonemic tonal categories in a tonal language is a prerequisite for understanding speech. There has been a large literature on how second language (L2) learners perceive and process L2 lexical tones with behavioral and/or neural measures (e.g., Asaridou, Takashima, Dan, Hagoort, & McQueen, 2015;Deng, Chandrasekaran, Wang, & Wong, 2016;Hao, 2018;Morett, 2019;Yang, Gates, Molenaar, & Li, 2015), but it remains controversial whether and how native language (L1) tonal experience affects learning of lexical tones in an L2.…”

Multi-Talker Speech Promotes Greater Knowledge-Based Spoken Mandarin Word Recognition in First and Second Language Listeners

“…For example, L1 and L2 listeners differ in the way they use F0 height and F0 direction cues (Gandour, 1983;Gottfried and Suiter, 1997). L1 English-L2 Mandarin listeners, for example, tend to initially weight F0 height cues greater than F0 direction cues; this results in perceptual confusion between tones with high F0 onsets -Tone 1 and 4and tones with low F0 onset -Tone 2 and 3 (Wang et al, 1999;Chandrasekaran et al, 2010;Hao, 2012Hao, , 2018Wiener, 2017). Though, it is worth noting even L1 Mandarin listeners who heavily weight F0 direction still demonstrate some confusion between Tone 2 and 3 given their similar contours (Shen and Lin, 1991;Shen et al, 2013).…”