Developmental changes in categorical perception of Mandarin Chinese tones

Abstract

This study examined developmental changes in categorical perception of Mandarin Chinese lexical tones by 22 adults and 16 10-year-olds, who were all native Mandarin Chinese speakers. The speech stimuli included three types of continuum, tone 1 (T1)/tone 2 (T2), tone 1/tone 4 (T4) and tone 2/tone 4. The experimental protocol used conventional identification and discrimination tasks. The results confirmed categorical perception of the tonal continua by both adult and child groups. Refined tests further revealed the existence of T1 category with two phonetic boundaries in the T2/T4 continuum. More importantly, age-dependent differences were observed in discrimination accuracy and sensitivity to pitch height. Collectively, the data suggest that although adult-like categorical perception of lexical tones can be found by 10 years of age and earlier as the literature suggested, the dynamic developmental trajectory in fine-tuning the categorical perception of lexical tones extends beyond the age of 10.