Abstract
The scientific community has been divided as to the origin of individual differences in perceiving the sounds of a second language (L2). There are two alternative explanations: a general psychoacoustic origin vs. a speech-specific one. A previous study showed that such individual variability is linked to the perceivers’ speech-specific capabilities, rather than the perceivers’ psychoacoustic abilities. However, we assume that the selection of participants and parameters of sound stimuli might not appropriate. Therefore, we adjusted the sound stimuli and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from two groups of early, proficient Cantonese (L1)-Mandarin (L2) bilinguals who differed in their mastery of the Mandarin (L2) phonetic contrast /in-ing/, to explore whether the individual differences in perceiving L2 stem from participants’ ability to discriminate various pure tones (frequency, duration and pattern). To precisely measure the participants’ acoustic discrimination, mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by the oddball paradigm was recorded in the experiment. The results showed that significant differences between good perceivers (GPs) and poor perceivers (PPs) were found in the three general acoustic conditions (frequency, duration and pattern), and the MMN amplitude for GP was significantly larger than for PP. Therefore, our results support a general psychoacoustic origin of individual variability in L2 phonetic mastery.
Highlights
In the process of learning a new language, we often find that the biggest challenge is the mastery of the foreign accent
This study indicated that the good perceivers (GPs) group was better than the poor perceivers (PPs) group at perceiving general acoustic frequency when the deviant stimuli were 1,060 and 1,090 Hz, after we lowered the difficulty of the materials, which complied with the idea of this research
We found that the mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitude for the GP group was larger than the PP group at the central location (t(13) = 2.12, p = 0.044
Summary
In the process of learning a new language, we often find that the biggest challenge is the mastery of the foreign accent. In the acquisition of native language, the ability to process rapid changes of sound is especially vital for early language acquisition [6,7,8,9,10], and the high density analysis of general acoustic features in10-odd milliseconds plays a vital role in analyzing the speech stream and determining the phonetic category. The studies of typical young children [6,11] and children with dyslexia [12,13] have found that the ability to detect, identify and integrate non-speech sounds (included the time characteristics and acoustic spectral characteristics) was very important for processing the general acoustic features in speech and the barriers in the development of language derive from the speech-specific system, and are affected by the general psychoacoustic system. The psychoacoustic abilities used to analyze various kinds of acoustic information contained in speech will directly affect the identification of the speech
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