Effects of language experience and sentential context in categorical perception of Mandarin tones

Abstract

Previous research shows that sentential context plays an important role in lexical tone recognition when the fundamental frequency is degraded by noise or flattened. The present study aimed to test how language experience and sentence context would jointly influence the categorical perception of Mandarin tones. Thirty native Chinese speakers and thirty CFL (Chinese-as-a-foreign-language) learners participated in the study. The experimental protocol used identification and discrimination tasks for categorical perception of the synthetic tone2-tone3 continuum. Experimental conditions included the target tones in isolation and the same tones embedded in initial, medial and final position of sentences. The location, slope, and width of the phonetic boundary in identification function and the discrimination accuracy were assessed. The categorical perception test results indicated strong influences of language experience and sentential context, which has important pedagogical implications for second language learners.