Perception and production of Mandarin Chinese tones

Jongman, Allard; Wang, Yue; Moore, Corinne B.; Sereno, Joan A.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511550751.020

Cited by 62 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…As is apparent in the figure, this simulation gave rise to a delay for tone 2–3 pairs as compared to the other contrasts in terms of the trajectory of looks to target. This replicates published findings in the literature, where it has been shown that compared to other tonal contrast pairs, tones 2 and 3 compete with one another more strongly (Chandrasekaran, Krishnan, & Gandour, 2007), because they are discriminated on the basis of later acoustic cues during the unfolding of the syllable (Jongman, Wang, Moore, & Sereno, 2006; Shen, Deutsch, & Rayner, 2013; Whalen & Xu, 1992). …”

Section: Simulation Of Published Experimental Datasupporting

confidence: 90%

Encoding lexical tones in jTRACE: a simulation of monosyllabic spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese

Shuai

Malins

2016

Behav Res

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Despite its prevalence as one of the most highly influential models of spoken word recognition, the TRACE model has yet to be extended to consider tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese. A key reason for this is that the model in its current state does not encode lexical tone. In this report, we present a modified version of the jTRACE model in which we borrowed on its existing architecture to code for Mandarin phonemes and tones. Units are coded in a way that is meant to capture the similarity in timing of access to vowel and tone information that has been observed in previous studies of Mandarin spoken word recognition. We validated the model by first simulating a recent experiment that had used the visual world paradigm to investigate how native Mandarin speakers process monosyllabic Mandarin words (Malins & Joanisse, 2010). We then subsequently simulated two psycholinguistic phenomena: (1) differences in the timing of resolution of tonal contrast pairs, and (2) the interaction between syllable frequency and tonal probability. In all cases, the model gave rise to results comparable to those of published data with human subjects, suggesting that it is a viable working model of spoken word recognition in Mandarin. It is our hope that this tool will be of use to practitioners studying the psycholinguistics of Mandarin Chinese and will help inspire similar models for other tonal languages, such as Cantonese and Thai.

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Section: Simulation Of Published Experimental Datasupporting

confidence: 90%

Encoding lexical tones in jTRACE: a simulation of monosyllabic spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese

Shuai

Malins

2016

Behav Res

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“…Mandarin does not have segmental length contrasts (Lin, 2001), although Mandarin tones vary in length, and some listeners have been reported to use length to distinguish between tones when the main cue – the F0 pattern – has been artificially manipulated to be ambiguous (Tseng, Massaro, & Cohen, 1986; Blicher, Diehl, & Cohen, 1990; Jongman, Wang, Moore, & Sereno, 2006). As for sibilants, Mandarin has voiceless alveolo-palatals ([ɕ], [tɕ]) and retroflexes ([ʂ], [tʂ]) as allophones of the same phoneme: alveolo-palatals occur before high front vowels and the palatal glide, and retroflexes occur elsewhere (Lin, 2001).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of abstraction in non-native speech perception

Pająk

Lévy

2014

Journal of Phonetics

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The end-result of perceptual reorganization in infancy is currently viewed as a reconfigured perceptual space, “warped” around native-language phonetic categories, which then acts as a direct perceptual filter on any non-native sounds: naïve-listener discrimination of non-native-sounds is determined by their mapping onto native-language phonetic categories that are acoustically/articulatorily most similar. We report results that suggest another factor in non-native speech perception: some perceptual sensitivities cannot be attributed to listeners’ warped perceptual space alone, but rather to enhanced general sensitivity along phonetic dimensions that the listeners’ native language employs to distinguish between categories. Specifically, we show that the knowledge of a language with short and long vowel categories leads to enhanced discrimination of non-native consonant length contrasts. We argue that these results support a view of perceptual reorganization as the consequence of learners’ hierarchical inductive inferences about the structure of the language’s sound system: infants not only acquire the specific phonetic category inventory, but also draw higher-order generalizations over the set of those categories, such as the overall informativity of phonetic dimensions for sound categorization. Non-native sound perception is then also determined by sensitivities that emerge from these generalizations, rather than only by mappings of non-native sounds onto native-language phonetic categories.

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“…Tonal contour is optimally characterized by the starting and ending fundamental frequency values for each syllable (Jongman, Wang, Moore, & Sereno, 2006). Tone 1 is associated with a high, level contour, Tone 2 with a rising contour, and Tone 4 with a falling contour.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influences of lexical tone and pitch on word recognition in bilingual infants

Singh

Foong

2012

Cognition

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Infants’ abilities to discriminate native and non-native phonemes have been extensively investigated in monolingual learners, demonstrating a transition from language-general to language-specific sensitivities over the first year after birth. However, these studies have mostly been limited to the study of vowels and consonants in monolingual learners. There is relatively little research on other types of phonetic segments, such as lexical tone, even though tone languages are very well represented across languages of the world. The goal of the present study is to investigate how Mandarin Chinese-English bilingual learners contend with non-phonemic pitch variation in English spoken word recognition. This is contrasted with their treatment of phonemic changes in lexical tone in Mandarin spoken word recognition. The experimental design was cross-sectional and three age-groups were sampled (7.5 months, 9 months and 11 months). Results demonstrated limited generalization abilities at 7.5 months, where infants only recognized words in English when matched in pitch and words in Mandarin that were matched in tone. At 9 months, infants recognized words in Mandarin Chinese that matched in tone, but also falsely recognized words that contrasted in tone. At this age, infants also recognized English words whether they were matched or mismatched in pitch. By 11 months, infants correctly recognized pitch-matched and - mismatched words in English but only recognized tonal matches in Mandarin Chinese.

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Perception and production of Mandarin Chinese tones

Cited by 62 publications

References 29 publications

Encoding lexical tones in jTRACE: a simulation of monosyllabic spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese

Encoding lexical tones in jTRACE: a simulation of monosyllabic spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese

The role of abstraction in non-native speech perception

Influences of lexical tone and pitch on word recognition in bilingual infants

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