Identification of multi-speaker Mandarin tones in noise by native and non-native listeners

Effects of speaker variability and noise on Mandarin fricative identification by native and non-native listeners

“…Similarly, the absence of a tonal context also compromised non-native tone perception to a greater extent (Gottfried and Suiter, 1997;Lee et al, 2008Lee et al, , 2009Lee et al, , 2010b. By contrast, neither speaker variability (Lee et al, 2009(Lee et al, , 2010a nor noise (Lee et al, 2010a) affected non-native tone perception disproportionately. The tasks used in these studies were relatively simple and did not involve complex linguistic processing (e.g., tone identification from isolated syllables), yet non-native listeners were affected disproportionately by certain adverse conditions, but not by others.…”

“…For example, Bradlow and Pisoni (1999) and Takayanagi et al (2002) showed that the effect of speaker variability on auditory word recognition was comparable between native and nonnative listeners. In the suprasegmental literature, Lee et al (2009) and Lee et al (2010a) also showed that speaker variability disrupted Mandarin tone identification similarly for native and non-native listeners. It appears that speaker variability does not present a special challenge to non-native listeners.…”

“…In this study, we extended our previous Mandarin tone studies on the effects of speaker variability and noise (Lee et al, 2009(Lee et al, , 2010a to an investigation of Mandarin fricative perception by native and non-native (English) listeners. As in the tone studies, we presented the fricative stimuli in two presentation formats (blocked by speaker and mixed across speakers) to evaluate the effect of speaker variability.…”

“…Cutler et al (2004) showed that the effect of noise on phoneme recognition is comparable between native (English) and non-native (Dutch) listeners. In an investigation of Mandarin tone identification by native and non-native listeners, Lee et al (2010a) also showed that the effects of noise and language background did not interact, suggesting that non-native tone perception was not affected to a greater extent than native tone perception. Cutler et al (2004) suggest that the commonly reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native perception in adverse conditions does not arise from difficulties at the phoneme identification level.…”

Aging effect on Mandarin Chinese vowel and tone identification

“…Many studies on speech perception in Mandarin Chinese have focused primarily on tone perception, but not on phonemic perception (Lee et al, 2010;Liu et al, 2014). Although a number of studies have investigated vowel perception in non-tone languages, little is known about how phonemic and tone information is processed together in native speakers of tone language.…”