Training Children to Perceive Non-native Lexical Tones: Tone Language Background, Bilingualism, and Auditory-Visual Information

Abstract

This study investigates the role of language background and bilingual status in the perception of foreign lexical tones. Eight groups of participants, consisting of children of 6 and 8 years from one of four language background (tone or non-tone) × bilingual status (monolingual or bilingual)—Thai monolingual, English monolingual, English-Thai bilingual, and English-Arabic bilingual were trained to perceive the four Mandarin lexical tones. Half the children in each of these eight groups were given auditory-only (AO) training and half auditory-visual (AV) training. In each group Mandarin tone identification was tested before and after (pre- and post-) training with both auditory-only test (ao-test) and auditory-visual test (av test). The effect of training on Mandarin tone identification was minimal for 6-year-olds. On the other hand, 8-year-olds, particularly those with tone language experience showed greater pre- to post-training improvement, and this was best indexed by ao-test trials. Bilingual vs. monolingual background did not facilitate overall improvement due to training, but it did modulate the efficacy of the Training mode: for bilinguals both AO and AV training, and especially AO, resulted in performance gain; but for monolinguals training was most effective with AV stimuli. Again this effect was best indexed by ao-test trials. These results suggest that tone language experience, be it monolingual or bilingual, is a strong predictor of learning unfamiliar tones; that monolinguals learn best from AV training trials and bilinguals from AO training trials; and that there is no metalinguistic advantage due to bilingualism in learning to perceive lexical tones.

Perceptual Learning of Uncategorized Arabic Phonemes among Congenitally Deaf, Non-native Children with Cochlear Implants

“…Discrimination task is exclusively based on short-term memory and carried out auditorily [33, 81-83, 98, 99]. In a short time (100-500 ms), one has to discriminate the two sounds [49,53,56,61,92,[99][100][101]. This discrepancy might be due to information transmission difficulties using the cochlear implant hearing device [30,35,98].…”

Tonal properties in a non-tonal language: The case of Indonesian

“…Numerous past studies dealt with Mandarin tonal systems [ [15] , [16] , [17] , [18] , [19] , [20] ]. They all seem to agree that the perception of Mandarin tonal system by speakers of tonal languages and in comparison with those of non-tonal languages specifies that the speakers of tonal languages perform better at perceiving the properties of Mandarin tones than those of non-tonal language speakers.…”