Cross-language assimilation of lexical tone

Abstract

We extend to lexical-tone systems a model of second-language perception, the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best & Tyler, 2007), to examine whether/how native-language lexical-tone inventory composition influences perception of novel tone. Native listeners of Cantonese, Thai, and Mandarin perform a tone mapping-rating assimilation task. Listeners hear CV syllables bearing all tones of Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin, and Yoruba - languages with different tone inventories. They (1) map the tone they hear to the nearest native tone category, and (2) provide a goodness rating on a 5-point scale (5 = perfect). As predicted by the PAM, listeners assimilated non-native tones to the phonetically-closest native tone categories. Listeners attended primarily to pitch-contour, and secondarily to pitch-height, contrasts for the mappings. E.g., Mandarin listeners assimilated the Thai high “level” (phonetically mid-to-high-rising) tone to Mandarin rising tone 76% of the time, and to Mandarin high-level tone only 22% of the time. Also as predicted, all novel tones did not assimilate equally well to native categories; mappings received ratings between 2.9-4.1, averaging 3.5. The groups’ different patterns of results indicate that novel-tone perception is influenced by experience with the native-language tone inventory, and that listeners attend to gradient phonetic detail to assimilate novel tones to native-tone categories. This work is supported by NSF grant 0965227 to J.A.