Lexical tone processing by monolingual and bilingual speakers of tone and non tone languages

Abstract

This experiment tested early Chinese–English bilinguals (age of arrival in Canada < 2 years) for lexical encoding processes of F0 contour (tone). Earlier experimentation (e.g., Mattock and Burnham, 2006) has indicated that processing of lexical tone differs between the two corresponding monolingual groups, demonstrating that English monolingual infants begin to disregard F0 contour differences in non word minimal pairs by the age of nine months, while Chinese monolingual infants do not exhibit this behavior. In the present study, three groups of participants were tested using a short-term memory encoding task (Dupoux et al., 2010) with non word minimal pairs differentiated only by F0 contour. Although the tone contours utilized in the experiment were non-native to all speakers, Chinese-dominant bilinguals (adult arrival in Canada) performed significantly better than English monolinguals in recalling long non word sequences differentiated only by these contours, while their performance in simple phoneme-differentiated sequences (e.g., [mu, fu]) was equal to that of the English speakers. However, the target group of early Chinese–English bilinguals produced scores corresponding to a bimodal distribution, with some speakers correlating to English monolinguals' performance and others corresponding to Chinese-dominant speakers' scores. Correspondence to one mode or another was analyzed using a series of sociolinguistic factors.