Linguistic experience and musical training in shaping Mandarin tone perception by trilingual non-native Cantonese listeners

Abstract

Mandarin tones are perceived categorically by native listeners, but not by non-native listeners (e.g., Francis et al., 2003; Hallé et al., 2004; Xu et al., 2006). Vowel quality, stimulus duration, and language background also significantly contributed to categorical perception of tones among native and non-native listeners (Chen et al., 2017). In comparison to pitch production, it was found that a relative shorter duration is required to perceive than to produce pitch contours, with non-tonal listeners needing longer duration to detect a change in the pitch direction. Duration asserts a stronger effect on between- and within-category discrimination patterns among tonal listeners. Fewer studies investigated the effects of stimulus duration and vowel quality in trilingual non-native speakers with and without musical training. Our study examines categorical perception of resynthesized pitch stimuli by 13 trilingual Cantonese musicians and 13 Cantonese non-musicians. We manipulated tones on both low and high vowels ([a] and [i]) to create 7-step, level-to-falling and level-to-rising pitch continua on both [a] and [i] vowels with 9 different duration values. Cantonese speakers participated in identification and same-different tasks.