How within-category gradience in lexical tones influences native Chinese listeners and second-language Chinese learners recognize words: An eye-tracking study

Abstract

This study investigates whether within-category gradience in lexical tones influences native and non-native Chinese listeners’ word recognition. Previous offline research found that Chinese listeners have a more categorical perception of lexical tones, and thus show less sensitivity to within-category variability in tones, than non-native listeners. However, it is unclear whether native and non-native listeners have sensitivity to within-category gradience during online word recognition. Native Chinese listeners and proficient adult English-speaking Chinese learners were tested in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment. The target was a level tone and the competitor was a high-rising tone, or vice versa. The auditory stimuli were manipulated such that the target tone was either canonical in the standard condition, phonetically more distant from the competitor in the distant condition, or phonetically closer to the competitor in the close condition. Growth curve analysis on fixations suggested that native ...