Effects of perceptual training on the perception of Korean boundary tones by Chinese learners

Abstract

Previous studies have proven that High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) is an effective method for training non-native listeners to discriminate L2 phoneme contrasts or prosodic contrasts, such as Chinese tone and Japanese segment length. However, it still remains uninvestigated whether this training method can be successfully applied to the perceptual training of nondistinctive L2 intonation. This study aims to prove that the HVPT method is also effective in training Chinese learners of Korean to distinguish Korean boundary tones. Korean boundary tones have three important grammatical and pragmatic functions: distinction of declarative and interrogative sentences, distinction of wh- and yes-no questions, and distinction of ambiguous meanings of some terminal endings. Our experiment is designed to train Chinese learners to discriminate these three functions using the HVPT method. 40 Chinese learners participated in 10 online sessions. They were exposed to 276 sentences delivered by different speakers each session. The subjects showed significant improvements in discriminating all three intonational functions in the posttest. Lower proficiency learners showed greater improvements. A notable change occurred in the development of categorical perception. The category boundaries between declarative and interrogative sentences shifted closer to the native speakers’ after the training.