Identification of Mandarin coarticulated tones by inexperienced and experienced English learners of Mandarin.

Abstract

Two groups of native English speakers, relatively inexperienced (IE) (N=14) with 4 months of Mandarin study and relatively more experienced (EE) (N=14) with 12 months of study, were asked to identify coarticulated Mandarin lexical tones in disyllabic words. The results show that the EE group was better at identifying Mandarin tones than the IE group. Interestingly both groups were more accurate at identifying tones of the second (i.e., last) syllables than tones of the first syllables. Two types of errors were found in both groups: tonal direction misperception and tonal height misperception. EE committed fewer tonal direction errors than IE. However, EE still made considerable amount of tonal height errors. These results suggest the following: (1) The ability to perceive coarticulated tones improves with learning experience. (2) Due perhaps to a recency effect, final tones are remembered better than initial tones, and final syllable tones are misperceived less frequently than initial syllable tones. (3) The ability to identify tonal direction may improve faster than the ability to identify tonal height among English speakers and thus while tonal direction errors decrease with experience, misperception of tonal height remains even with increasing learning experience.