A cross-linguistic study of Taiwanese tone perception by Taiwanese and English listeners

Abstract

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.

The role of spectro-temporal fine structure cues in lexical-tone discrimination for French and Mandarin listeners

“…In apparent contrast with previously published investigations on lexical-tone discrimination (e.g., Burnham and Francis, 1997;Hall e et al, 2004;Sun and Huang, 2012), both French-and Mandarin-speaking listeners were able to correctly perceive differences in pitch contours with the present lexical tones. The absence of difference between language groups results from a ceiling effect (that is from the high performance of both groups for the current discrimination task and for the present speech stimuli that were carefully selected from a large set of clearly articulated utterances).…”

Enhanced music sensitivity in 9-month-old bilingual infants

“…Four natural T1–T4 pairs were recorded. To avoid a ceiling effect due to the high acoustic salience of the T1–T4 contrast (Huang and Johnson 2010; Sun and Huang 2012; Liu and Kager 2014), an acoustically contracted contrast was created from a T1–T4 tonal contrast by manipulating the F0 direction via the software PRAAT (Boersma and Weenink 2010) to reduce the acoustic salience of the contrast. Four interpolation points along the pitch contours (at 0, 33, 67, and 100%) were introduced.…”

Influence of within-category tonal information in the recognition of Mandarin-Chinese words by native and non-native listeners: An eye-tracking study

“…Existing research on the perception of lexical tones suggests that native Mandarin listeners perceive Mandarin tones categorically, with listeners relying primarily on pitch contour differences to distinguish the tones (Burnham & Mattock, 2007;Hallé, Chang, & Best, 2004;Sun & Huang, 2012;Wang, 1976). For instance, using identification and discrimination tasks, Wang (1976) found that Mandarin listeners showed the typical pattern of categorical perception when perceiving a dynamic tonal continuum varying from a level tone (T1) to a rising tone (T2); that is, listeners showed steep slopes at the category boundary in their categorization function and marked peaks at the category boundary in their discrimination function.…”