Cross-linguistic perception of Itunyoso Trique tone

Abstract

Recent findings have argued in favor of the categorical perception of tonal contrasts in Taiwanese Mandarin and Standard Mandarin (Hallé, Chang, & Best, 2004; Xu, Gandour, & Francis, 2006), and most recently in Mandarin and Cantonese (Peng et al., 2010). Findings in favor of the categorical perception of tone emerge most clearly from cross-linguistic work on speech perception. The current study continues this line of research by investigating the categorical perception of Itunyoso Trique tone among Trique and French listeners. Tonal stimuli were presented to listeners in an AXB discrimination task (2AFC) and an AXB identification task (2AFC), closely following methods used in Hallé et al. (2004). Evidence for a listener sensitivity to tonal categories was found for Trique listeners in their discrimination performance, but this pattern did not correspond to the identification performance. Overall, French speakers performed better overall at tone discrimination than Trique listeners, who largely ignored within-category phonetic differences. Both Trique and French listeners were found to be sensitive to psychoacoustic differences between stimuli, though French speakers relied more heavily on such differences. The findings here argue for the importance of both phonetic and auditory memory for the perception of Trique lexical tone.