Perception 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’ tone perception space was warped due to tone sandhi processes that neutralize two otherwise contrastive lexical tones. On the other hand, the English-speaking listeners showed phonetic listening, paying more attention to the similarity in pitch offset and onset between a pair of tones.