Advanced Second Language Learners’ Perception of Lexical Tone Contrasts

Abstract

It is commonly believed that second language (L2) acquisition of lexical tones presents a major challenge for learners from nontonal language backgrounds. This belief is somewhat at odds with research that consistently shows beginning learners making quick gains through focused tone training, as well as research showing advanced learners achieving near-native performance in tone identification tasks. However, other long-term difficulties related to L2 tone perception may persist, given the additional demands of word recognition and the effects of context. In the current study, we used behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) experiments to test whether perception of Mandarin tones is difficult for advanced L2 learners in isolated syllables, disyllabic words in isolation, and disyllabic words in sentences. Stimuli were more naturalistic and challenging than in previous research. While L2 learners excelled at tone identification in isolated syllables, they performed with very low accuracy in rejecting disyllabic tonal nonwords in isolation and in sentences. We also report ERP data from critical mismatching words in sentences; while L2 listeners showed no significant differences in responses in any condition, trends were not inconsistent with the overall pattern in behavioral results of less sensitivity to tone mismatches than to semantic or segmental mismatches. We interpret these results as evidence that Mandarin tones are in fact difficult for advanced L2 learners. However, the difficulty is not due primarily to an inability to perceive tones phonetically, but instead is driven by the need to process tones lexically, especially in multisyllable words.

Neurostimulation and Pupillometry: New Directions for Learning and Research in Applied Linguistics

“…Short-term interventions, such as sound-perception training, have helped native English speakers perceive lexical tone differences, but naïve trainees regularly fall short of consistently and accurately categorizing lexical tones, even taking as many as 18 training sessions to reach consistent performance (e.g., Bowles et al, 2016;Chandrasekaran et al, 2010;Li & DeKeyser, 2017;Wong & Perrachione, 2007). Native speakers of English who have attained high levels of proficiency in Mandarin often continue to perform below native Mandarin speakers on some measures of tone discrimination (e.g., Pelzl et al, 2019). Importantly, there is a high degree of variability among individual learning trajectories, which has spurred a number of studies examining individual differences that predict learning, such as music experience, nonlinguistic tone aptitude, and executive function (e.g., Bowles et al, 2016), or even differences in attended acoustic cues (e.g., Chandrasekaran et al, 2010).…”

“…Phonology is widely regarded as the linguistic domain that presents the greatest difficulty for adult L2 learners (Moyer, 2014). The notorious difficulty of acquiring novel phonological features, or sound patterns, is well documented, and accurately perceiving novel suprasegmental contrasts such as lexical tone presents a persistent challenge for even advanced learners (Pelzl et al, 2019) and is the subject of a substantial literature (see Pelzl, 2019, for a recent summary). A consistent finding among the many studies that have sought to improve L2 lexical tone acquisition via behavioral training is that certain domain-general abilities and aptitudes largely determine the success of training.…”

Statistical Regularities Affect the Perception of Second Language Speech: Evidence From Adult Classroom Learners of Mandarin Chinese

“…This would require testing advanced L2 learners, since undoubtedly the stimuli would include low token frequency syllables with sparse homophone densities; in other words, relatively rare syllables associated with infrequent morphemes or words. While there remains a dearth of studies on advanced L2 Mandarin learners’ tone perception, recent findings by Pelzl, Lau, Guo, and DeKeyser () suggest that learners with an average of 10 years of L2 study approach nativelike tone‐only categorization and syllable–tone lexical decision accuracy. Advanced L2 learners may therefore have a sufficiently sized lexicon and demonstrate nativelike sensitivity to phonological and lexical distribution information as we predict.…”

The effect of overnight consolidation in the perceptual learning of non-native tonal contrasts

“…Given previous findings on the effect of overnight consolidation in perceptual learning of novel segmental contrasts and the variable/dynamic nature of lexical tones, it is hypothesized that at least a similar facilitating effect of overnight consolidation will be found for perceptual learning of Cantonese level tones by Mandarin listeners. Specifically, those listeners who are trained in the evening are expected to perform better than those who are trained in the morning in perceiving the level tones produced by the new talker and probably also trained talkers, given a potential greater perceptual difficulty of target (three-way) tonal contrasts relative to (two-way) segmental contrasts [54][55][56]. We also aimed to test whether the overnight consolidation effects found for the identification alone in previous studies [e.g., 16] can be transferred or generalized to the discrimination of tonal contrasts by controlling stimuli variability in both tasks.…”