Categorical Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Second Language Speakers

Abstract

AbstractPrevious studies on categorical perception of tones mainly focus on native speakers and naïve second language (L2) listeners. Attempting to fill in this gap, this study examined the categorical perception of Mandarin tones by both native and L2 speakers along three tone continua in Mandarin Chinese. Both discrimination and identification tasks were employed in the study. The results of the discrimination task showed that the L2 listeners mainly relied on psychoacoustic cues in tone pair discrimination, while native listeners mainly relied on their phonological knowledge. As a result, the non-linguistic tone processing in discrimination tasks would not enable the L2 learners to normalize speech, namely learning to de-emphasize within-category differences and to focus more on between-category differences, hence building a relatively less stable L2 tone system, as well as the difficulty in acquiring tone categories. The results of the identification tasks confirmed the existence of the T2–T3 and T1–T3 and T4–T3 (only to some extent) continua in Mandarin Chinese for both native and L2 listeners, and the potential confusion between Tone 3 and the other tones in Mandarin Chinese seems to explain the difficulty in acquiring this tone for both native and L2 speakers.KeywordsCategorical perceptionMandarin toneIdentification and discriminationPsychoacoustic cues