Non-native perception of Vietnamese tone contrasts

Abstract

A listener’s ability to discriminate non-native sound contrasts has been shown to be largely influenced by the listener's native phonological system (Best et al., 2003; Tyler et al., 2014; Tskuda, 2012). Looking specifically at suprasegmental contrasts, experimental results suggest that the degree to which pitch is used to distinguish lexical items in a speaker’s L1 influences how well they are able to detect non-native tone contrasts (Schaefer & Darcy, 2014). However, these results are based only on Thai tones. The present study shows that native speakers of English (a stress language), and Mandarin (a tone language) do not perform significantly differently in their ability to perceive Vietnamese tone contrasts. Results from an ABX categorization task show that native speakers of English are not more likely to make errors in categorizing Vietnamese tones than native speakers of Mandarin, and both groups have difficulty perceiving the difference between the low falling tone and the low falling-rising tone...