The perception of speech and non-speech tones by tone and non-tone language listeners
نویسندگان
چکیده
This study tested how linguistic experience and psychoacoustic factors affect tonal perception of Mandarin, English and French speakers. AX discrimination tasks of speech and non-speech tones were conducted. Results showed that the subjects performed differently in the speech and nonspeech tasks. In the speech task, while the three L1 groups shared some confusable tone pairs due to their acoustical similarity, they differed in specific pairs under the influence of L1 linguistic experience. In the non-speech task, however, the three L1 groups did not have different error patterns of individual pairs. In short, both L1 experience and psychoacoustic similarity of stimuli were found to have an impact on the perception of non-native tones.
منابع مشابه
The Effects of Pitch Range and Duration on Tone Categorical Perception
Previous research has mainly focused on the influence of language experience (cross-language or cross-dialect), and stimulus complexity (speech vs. non-speech) on the categorical perception of tones. This study further investigates whether pitch range and duration affect tone categorical perception. Four speech tone continua differing in pitch range and duration were presented to native Mandari...
متن کاملCategorizing Mandarin tones into listeners' native prosodic categories: the role of phonetic properties
Studies have shown that assimilating non-native tones to the categories of listeners’ native prosodic systems (e.g., tone, pitch-accent, and intonation) seems to be feasible (So, 2006; So and Best, 2008; So and Best, in press), and is consistent with the assumptions of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best, 1995, PAM). This raises an important question as to how adults perceive non-native lex...
متن کاملPerception of Mandarin Tones by Chinese- and English-speaking Listeners
This paper reports on two experiments that tested the hypothesis that native phonology may influence speech perception. Both experiments used natural speech tokens of Standard Mandarin tones and Chineseand American Englishspeaking listeners. The results from both the AX discrimination and the degree of difference rating experiments show language-specific effects: the Chinese-speaking listeners’...
متن کاملThe visual perception of lexical tone
Visual speech (lipreading) supports speech perception not only when the auditory signal is limited, degraded, or miss-ing, but also in mismatched auditory and visual speech component conditions when the auditory signal is clear and undegraded. While most of this research has been done with segments (consonants and vowels), research at MARCS has now provided evidence for visual speech cues for n...
متن کاملCategorical Perception of Lexical Tone by Tonal and Non-tonal Language Speakers
Categorical perception occurs when a physical continuum is perceived discontinuously. In speech, a vast body of research has shown that consonants are perceived categorically whereas vowels are perceived continuously. The other major phonetic unit of speech, lexical tone, has been relatively neglected in categorical perception studies. Here tonal language (Thai), and non-tonal language (Austral...
متن کامل