Tone Attrition in Mandarin Speakers of Varying English Proficiency

Quam, Carolyn; Creel, Sarah C.

doi:10.1044/2016_jslhr-s-15-0248

Cited by 5 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…This is especially striking because, for the participants in Experiment 3, Mandarin dominance did influence both accuracy and gaze efficiency in the familiar-word post-test (replicating work reported elsewhere [47]). The lack of Mandarin-dominance effects on recognition of newly learned words suggests that explicit direction to attend to tone contrasts may have taken advantage of residual plasticity in tone encoding in less-Mandarin-dominant participants, allowing them to excel relative to English speakers.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…Because the proportion of error responses was already reflected in the accuracy data, we excluded error trials from gaze analyses so that the two measures would be more independent. Gaze analyses on correct trials alone might reveal processing differences even when participants ultimately clicked on the correct picture (e.g., [47, 48]).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An Eyelink Remote eye-tracker (SR Research; www.sr-research.com) collected visual fixation data using the Eyelink toolbox for Matlab ([46]). Following the test phase, bilinguals completed a Mandarin familiar-word recognition experiment with tone and vowel minimal pairs (details reported in [47]), followed by the MINT and BDS.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mandarin-English Bilinguals Process Lexical Tones in Newly Learned Words in Accordance with the Language Context

Quam

Creel

2017

PLoS ONE

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Previous research has mainly considered the impact of tone-language experience on ability to discriminate linguistic pitch, but proficient bilingual listening requires differential processing of sound variation in each language context. Here, we ask whether Mandarin-English bilinguals, for whom pitch indicates word distinctions in one language but not the other, can process pitch differently in a Mandarin context vs. an English context. Across three eye-tracked word-learning experiments, results indicated that tone-intonation bilinguals process tone in accordance with the language context. In Experiment 1, 51 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 26 English speakers without tone experience were taught Mandarin-compatible novel words with tones. Mandarin-English bilinguals out-performed English speakers, and, for bilinguals, overall accuracy was correlated with Mandarin dominance. Experiment 2 taught 24 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 25 English speakers novel words with Mandarin-like tones, but English-like phonemes and phonotactics. The Mandarin-dominance advantages observed in Experiment 1 disappeared when words were English-like. Experiment 3 contrasted Mandarin-like vs. English-like words in a within-subjects design, providing even stronger evidence that bilinguals can process tone language-specifically. Bilinguals (N = 58), regardless of language dominance, attended more to tone than English speakers without Mandarin experience (N = 28), but only when words were Mandarin-like—not when they were English-like. Mandarin-English bilinguals thus tailor tone processing to the within-word language context.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mandarin-English Bilinguals Process Lexical Tones in Newly Learned Words in Accordance with the Language Context

Quam

Creel

2017

PLoS ONE

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“…Interference of tones of different phonetic systems is unlikely to be the primary cause for phonetic attrition in tonal languages -it occurs in speakers of non-tonal languages as well. Thus, proficiency in English is correlated with reduced word recognition in tone-disambiguated trials even in those bilinguals who learned Mandarin from birth (Quam & Creel, 2017). Similar loss in tonal sensitivity was found in native Yoruba speakers who acquired English before puberty (Shittu & Tessier, 2015).…”

Section: Music Psychologymentioning

confidence: 72%

Music Cognition from Birth to Adolescence: A Structuralist Approach

Nikolsky¹

2022

Preprint

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This book draws a new perspective on music as a special form of cognition that provides growing children with the means to mediate their emotional state and attitude to suit their physical and social environment. My conclusions are based on new evidence coming from: 1) musicological analysis of the original and spontaneous vocalizations by children, selected to represent the milestones in the development of music cognition; 2) comprehensive research on "ear development" throughout early childhood, systematically conducted in the USSR/Russia on a large pool of subjects during the 1920-1980s; 3) data on music perception by people habituated to non-Western forms of music, including timbre-oriented music traditions of northeast Eurasia; and 4) research coming from Vygotskian school on sociogenesis and objectivization of musical sound in early childhood (published in Russian only). The principal objective of this book is to arm researchers and students with tools to analyze, interpret, and evaluate the patterns of tonal organization in children musicking - and to inter-relate these patterns to cross-cultural patterns of early verbal, social, and emotional development. Children’s musical cognition needs a thorough revision because of the old erroneous belief, still widespread amongst developmental psychologists, that the principles of Western tonality constitute a universal modus operandi, intuitively sought by children from birth. According to this view, early children’s musicking constitutes a “defective” implementation of adult’s music due to children’s deficiencies in vocal control and its coordination with hearing. In reality, early childhood musicking constitutes a peculiar type of music, different from adult’s music – very much like children’s early speech that follows its own principles, different from adult’s speech. The principles of children’s musicking ought to be inferred from the structural organization of their non-imitative attempts to make music - bottom-to-top (as opposed to the current "a priori" top-to-bottom method of describing children's music in terms of Western tonality). Some other important issues covered in this book are the goals of musical development in childhood, the issues of musical attrition, bimusicality, and normalcy of musical abilities, the modularity of musical hearing, and the relation between musical and real-life emotions.

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“…Note that the 'maximally different' trials, which we will call 'baseline' trials, are distinct from the 'tone & vowel' trial type used in Experiment 1 and by Quam and Creel (2017a), as the words are more distinct in Experiment 2. However, this trial type was used in previous work (Quam & Creel, 2017b). These trial pairs were used to generate pseudo-randomized orders, which were checked for repeating patterns of which side of the screen the target appeared on 4 , repeating patterns of trial type, and to ensure that all trial types were distributed evenly from start to end of the generated order.…”

Section: Experimental Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attrition Effects in Mandarin-English Bilinguals of Varying Proficiencies

Elkinton¹,

Forman²,

Yuen³

et al.

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This thesis is a continuation and expansion of Quam and Creel (2017a), who found that English-dominant native Mandarin speakers showed an attrition effect in their ability to process tones. Experiment 1 of this thesis aimed to replicate their findings, which were mostly upheld. Experiment 2 aimed to differentiate two alternative explanations for the selective tone attrition effects offered in Quam and Creel (2017a). One explanation is that lexical tones are more prone to attrition because of their inherent properties. A second explanation is that consistent use of English vowel categories reinforced the particular Mandarin vowel contrasts that were used, as opposed to the tones, which do not occur in English. We aimed to differentiate these explanations by testing Mandarin-English bilinguals on vowel contrasts that do not occur in English. Continued recruitment efforts will enable us to differentiate the two explanations.

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Tone Attrition in Mandarin Speakers of Varying English Proficiency

Cited by 5 publications

References 42 publications

Mandarin-English Bilinguals Process Lexical Tones in Newly Learned Words in Accordance with the Language Context

Mandarin-English Bilinguals Process Lexical Tones in Newly Learned Words in Accordance with the Language Context

Music Cognition from Birth to Adolescence: A Structuralist Approach

Attrition Effects in Mandarin-English Bilinguals of Varying Proficiencies

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