Perception of nonnative tonal contrasts by Mandarin-English and English-Mandarin sequential bilinguals (original) (raw)
Related papers
2014
This study investigates the effects of adult second language (L2) acquisition on perception of non-native phonological categories. Specifically, monolingual American English speakers, and American English speakers who have learned Mandarin in adulthood were tested on perceptual discrimination of Thai and Mandarin tonal contrasts. This research question extends previous work by Wayland and Guion (2004) as well as Schaefer and Darcy (2013), who found that native Mandarin speakers perceive Thai tones significantly more accurately than native American English speakers. However, it remains an open question as to whether L2 acquisition of Mandarin would confer a congruent perceptual advantage on learners. If Mandarin learners form new phonological categories for tone, they should perceive both Mandarin and Thai tonal contrasts better than American English speakers who have no experience in a language with lexical tone. The findings indicate no significant difference in accuracy rates betw...
Language and Speech, 2010
This study examined the perception of Mandarin tones by two groups of Cantonese and Japanese (naïve) listeners. An identification task was given and their responses were analyzed in terms of A-prime scores and tonal errors. The results indicated that the performance of the Cantonese listeners was compatible with that of the Japanese listeners in A-prime scores and tonal errors. The listeners' tonal errors also showed that both the listener groups made considerable amount of errors for the T1-T4 and T2-T3 pairs, but the Cantonese listeners made more noticeable errors for the T1-T4 and T2-T3 pairs than did the Japanese listeners. The discrepancies in the performance between the two listener groups could be explained in the framework of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM: . The findings imply that linguistic experience of tones does not necessarily facilitate the perception of nonnative tones. However, the phonemic status and the phonetic similarities or dissimilarities between the prosodic systems of the target and native languages play a more important role in the perception of non-native tone contrasts. In addition, the results revealed some previously unnoticeable asymmetrical patterns for Mandarin tone perception by non-native listeners. Both the listener groups exhibited great confusion about the tones in the T1-T2, T1-T4, and T2-T3 pairs, but they made apparently fewer errors for the other three pairs of tones, T1-T3, T2-T4, and T3-T4. These imply that non-native tonal perception is also influenced by the phonetic characteristics of target tones.
Context effects on second-language learning of tonal contrasts
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (vol. 138, iss. 6, pp. 3703–3716), 2015
Studies of lexical tone learning generally focus on monosyllabic contexts, while reports of phonetic learning benefits associated with input variability are based largely on experienced learners. This study trained inexperienced learners on Mandarin tonal contrasts in order to test two hypotheses regarding the influence of context and variability on tone learning. The first hypothesis was that increased phonetic variability of tones in disyllabic contexts makes initial tone learning more challenging in disyllabic than monosyllabic words. The second hypothesis was that the learnability of a given tone varies across contexts due to differences in tonal variability. Results of a word learning experiment supported both hypotheses: tones were acquired less successfully in disyllables than in monosyllables, and the relative difficulty of disyllables was closely related to contextual tonal variability. These results indicate limited relevance of monosyllable-based data on Mandarin learning for the disyllabic majority of the Mandarin lexicon. Furthermore, in the short term variability can diminish learning; its effects are not necessarily beneficial, but dependent on acquisition stage and other learner characteristics. These findings thus highlight the importance of considering contextual variability and the interaction between variability and type of learner in the design, interpretation, and application of research on phonetic learning.
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 bilin-guals 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.
Does second language experience modulate perception of tones in a third language?
Previous studies have shown that English speakers pay attention to pitch height rather than direction, whereas Mandarin speakers are more sensitive to pitch direction than height in perception of lexical tones. The present study addresses if a second language (L2, i.e., Mandarin) overrides the influence of a native language (L1, i.e., English) in modulating listeners' use of pitch cues in the perception of tones in a third language (L3, i.e., Cantonese). English-speaking L2 learners (L2ers) of Mandarin constituted the target group. Mandarin speakers and English speakers without knowledge of Mandarin were included as control groups. In Experiment 1, all groups, naïve to Cantonese tones, discriminated Cantonese tones by distinguishing either a contour tone from a level tone (pitch direction pair) or a level tone from another level tone (pitch height pair). The results showed that L2ers patterned differently from both control groups with regard to pitch cues under the influence of ...
2019
Mandarin is one of the most representative tonal languages with four contrastive tone categories (Tone 1 (T1): high level (ā), Tone 2 (T2): high rising (á), Tone 3 (T3): dipping (ǎ), Tone 4 (T4): high falling (à)). Learning Mandarin tones is known to be difficult for speakers from diverse first language (L1) backgrounds. We examined how individuals differing in L1 (English, Japanese) and experience with Mandarin (learners, non-learners) might respond to six pairs of Mandarin tones using a four-alternative forced-choice discrimination test. The results showed that while Japanese non-learners generally outperformed English non-learners, possibly benefitting from contrastive use of pitch accent in L1, two groups of learners did not differ in their perception of Mandarin lexical tones. This suggests that English speakers can overcome the initial disadvantage and learn lexical tones in a new language as successfully as speakers of other Asian language.
Tone Pair Similarity and the Perception of Mandarin Tones by Mandarin and English Listeners
Previous work [1]–[5] has provided evidence that the perception of lexical tones by native speakers of Mandarin can be more categorical than that of naïve foreign listeners, for the tone pairings T1-T2, T2-T4, T1-T4 and T3-T4. The present study extended this work by testing Mandarin and naïve English listeners' perception of all six possible pairwise combinations of the four Mandarin tones, using identification and AXB discrimination tasks. The results revealed significant differences in perception across tone pairs, highlighting potential challenges for language learning. They also confirmed that Mandarin listeners were more categorical in their perception than the naïve listeners, who showed higher discrimination accuracy than Mandarin listeners. The latter finding contrasts with previous results for naïve French speakers' perception of Mandarin tone [2], and is consistent with an effect of native-language supra-segmental patterns on foreign-language tone perception.
The Perception of Mandarin Tones by Thai and Indonesian Speakers
TAL2018, Sixth International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages, 2018
This study makes use of diverse acoustic features to comprehensively examine the effects of native language (L1) experience, tonal context, segmental context (consonant aspiration type and vowel height), and the intrinsic phonetic similarity on the perception of Mandarin tones by Thai and Indonesian speakers. Two perception tasks which are fouralternative forced-choice identification tests for stimuli presented in isolation and carrier sentences were conducted. Results showed that Thai listeners performed significantly better than Indonesian counterparts in both identification tests and the assertion of tonal language speakers having advantages over the non-tonal L1 speakers in acquiring a new tonal language was supported in this study. However, both groups share some similar error patterns which might be due to the intrinsic phonetic similarity between the target tones. The effect of segmental context appeared to be not significant, while the tonal context was found to exert contrary effect on Thai and Indonesian listeners.
Perception of lexical tone across languages: evidence for a linguistic mode of processing
1996
Pairs of Thai tones were presented for perceptual discrimination in three linguistic contexts [normal speech, low-pass filtered speech, and as musical (violin) sounds] to tonal language speakers, Thai and Cantonese, and non-tonal (English) language speakers. English speakers discriminated the tonal contrasts significantly better in the musical context than in filtered speech, and in filtered speech better than in full speech. On the other hand, both Thai and Cantonese speakers perceived the tonal contrasts equally well in all three contexts. Thus, developmental absence of exposure to lexical tone results in a linguistic mode of processing which involves the attenuation of a basic psychoacoustic ability, pitch discrimination
How experience with tone in the native language affects the L2 acquisition of pitch accents
Frontiers in Psychology
This paper tested the ability of Mandarin learners of German, whose native language has lexical tone, to imitate pitch accent contrasts in German, an intonation language. In intonation languages, pitch accents do not convey lexical information; also, pitch accents are sparser than lexical tones as they only associate with prominent words in the utterance. We compared two kinds of German pitch-accent contrasts: (1) a “non-merger” contrast, which Mandarin listeners perceive as different and (2) a “merger” contrast, which sounds more similar to Mandarin listeners. Speakers of a tone language are generally very sensitive to pitch. Hypothesis 1 (H1) therefore stated that Mandarin learners produce the two kinds of contrasts similarly to native German speakers. However, the documented sensitivity to tonal contrasts, at the expense of processing phrase-level intonational contrasts, may generally hinder target-like production of intonational pitch accents in the L2 (Hypothesis 2, H2). Finall...