The present study investigated tone perception by speakers of Taiwanese Southern Min and those of American English with an AX discrimination task. Two Taiwanese Southern Min tone continua were constructed from natural speech stimuli. One continuum ranged from a high level tone (T55) to a mid level tone (T33), and the other from a high level (T55) to a high falling tone (T51). The results showed that perception by Taiwanese listeners was quasi-categorical for the contour-level tone continuum but mostly continuous for the level tone-level tone one. This suggests that the findings by Abramson (J Acoust Soc Am 61:S66, 1979a; In: Lindblom B, Ö hman S (eds) Frontiers of speech communication, 1979b) and Wang (Ann N Y Acad Sci 280:61-72, 1976) and Chan et al. (J Acoust Soc Am 58:S119, 1975) should be seen as complementary to each other rather than contradictory. Differences on tone perception between Taiwanese and English listeners were also found. Taiwanese listeners exhibited a region of higher discriminability on the T55-T51 continuum, while no discrimination peak was observed in English listeners' data. In addition, Taiwanese listeners were more accurate than English listeners in tone discrimination. These results indicate a qualitative difference in lexical tone perception between tone and nontone language listeners: tone language listeners appear to perceive tones as phonemic categories, utilizing cues such as pitch contour, while nontone language listeners rely more on psychoacoustic factors such as pitch height (cf.

Previous studies have shown that adult second language (L2) listeners often experience difficulty encoding language-specific phonological contrasts in word recognition. However, most research on L2 lexical representations has focused on consonants and vowels, and much remains unknown on how lexical tones are encoded in L2 phonological lexicon. In the current study, two experiments were conducted with twenty English learners of Mandarin and 20 Mandarin native speakers. In an ABX task, native speakers outperformed L2 listeners with higher accuracy rate and shorter response latencies. However, both groups showed poor discrimination sensitivity for pairs sharing similar tone contours (i.e., T2-T3). In a medium-lag repetition priming task, listeners were presented with a prime followed by a target that is either the same as the prime (e.g., ni2-ni2) or the other member of a minimal tone pair (e.g., ni2-ni3), eight to 20 items further down in the list. Results show that while significant facilitations in the repetition condition were observed in both groups, in the minimal-tone-pair condition (i.e., T2-T3), positive priming was observed only in the L2 group. The results of the two experiments provide insight into the interface between phonological and lexical levels in L2 spoken word recognition.

Previous studies have shown that a word’s phonological similarity to other words (i.e., phonological neighborhood) can influence its recognition. However, most research concerning lexical representations has been observed for neighbors based on segmental overlap, and little is known about such effects with suprasegmentals such as Mandarin tones. In the present study, two experiments were conducted with forty L2 listeners and 40 native speakers to examine how tone neighborhood density influences Mandarin spoken word recognition. In Experiment 1, speed and accuracy from both groups’ performance in an auditory lexical task were influenced by tone neighborhood density (i.e., fewer words were recognized from dense tone neighborhoods than from sparse tone neighborhoods). However, L2 listeners’ performance was inferior to native listeners’. In Experiment 2, form priming patterns showed that reliable facilitation was observed only when the prime and the target were identical, while monosyllabic Mandarin words differing only in tone failed to speed the response to the target. In addition, only L2 listeners showed an increase in RTs to respond to the target when it was preceded by tone overlap primes. The results of these experiments demonstrate that tone neighborhood is an important factor in L2 Mandarin spoken word recognition.