Coupling tonetics and perceptual attunement: The psychophysics of lexical tone contrast salience

Abstract

As with the coupling phonetics and psycholinguistics by such luminaries as Sereno and Jongman, we couple (a) discrepant cross-lab results in infant lexical tone perceptual attunement studies and (b) an adult cross-language lexical tone perception study. Three trajectories of lexical tone perception over infants’ first year have been found over labs, in which infants from differing language backgrounds have been tested with differing stimulus materials, viz., (i) Incremental (Singh’s lab—Singaporean Mandarin vs Singaporean English language background infants, Singaporean Mandarin tone contrasts; Tsao’s lab-Taiwanese and English language infants, Taiwanese Mandarin contrasts); (ii) Decremental (Burnham’s lab—Australian English but not for Cantonese or Mandarin language infants, Thai contrasts; Yeung/Werker’s lab—American English but not for Mandarin and Cantonese language infants, Cantonese contrasts); and (iii) U-shaped (Kager’s lab—Dutch infants, Mainland Mandarin contrasts). To investigate these discrepancies, we tested discrimination of Singaporean Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin, Hong Kong Cantonese, and Bangkok Thai tone contrasts by Singaporean Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin, Hong Kong Cantonese, Bangkok Thai, and Sydney Australian English listeners. Despite some discrepancies, this coupling revealed some congruences between psychophysical level of difficulty of tone contrasts within and between languages in the adult study, and the different developmental trajectories in the infant studies.