A study on perceptual training of Japanese CSL learners to discriminate Mandarin lexical tones

Abstract

In process of learning Chinese as a second language (CSL), Japanese natives have difficulties in tone perception. Among the four Chinese lexical tones, the tone pairs Tone 1-Tone 2 and Tone 1-Tone 4 are problematic for Japanese CSL beginners. In order to help them develop efficiently discriminating capability of the tone pairs, we designed a hybrid perceptual training scheme which combined adaptive training and high variability phonetic training. In the experiment, 16 Japanese, divided into 2 groups (8 for control group and 8 for trained group), participated in an 8-day experiment, with one hour per day. Finally, trained group and control group achieved relative progress rate of 76% and 33%, respectively. (p-value =0.034<0.05). The results demonstrate that the proposal of hybrid perceptual training significantly helped the Japanese participants improve the ability to discriminate the tone pairs.