Abstract
Research investigating listeners’ neural sensitivity to speech sounds has largely focused on segmental features. We examined Australian English listeners’ perception and learning of a supra-segmental feature, pitch direction in a non-native tonal contrast, using a passive oddball paradigm and electroencephalography. The stimuli were two contours generated from naturally produced high-level and high-falling tones in Mandarin Chinese, differing only in pitch direction (Liu and Kager, 2014). While both contours had similar pitch onsets, the pitch offset of the falling contour was lower than that of the level one. The contrast was presented in two orientations (standard and deviant reversed) and tested in two blocks with the order of block presentation counterbalanced. Mismatch negativity (MMN) responses showed that listeners discriminated the non-native tonal contrast only in the second block, reflecting indications of learning through exposure during the first block. In addition, listeners showed a later MMN peak for their second block of test relative to listeners who did the same block first, suggesting linguistic (as opposed to acoustic) processing or a misapplication of perceptual strategies from the first to the second block. The results also showed a perceptual asymmetry for change in pitch direction: listeners who encountered a falling tone deviant in the first block had larger frontal MMN amplitudes than listeners who encountered a level tone deviant in the first block. The implications of our findings for second language speech and the developmental trajectory for tone perception are discussed.
Highlights
More than 60% of the world languages are tonal languages in which word-level pitch variations are used to distinguish meanings by signaling prosodic contrasts at syllable and/or word levels of linguistic representation (Yip, 2002; Maddieson, 2005)
This is interesting for non-native speech perception as previous studies have shown that non-native listeners exhibit an Mismatch negativity (MMN) response for contrasts they did not discriminate in behavioral tasks (Kraus et al, 1995b; Näätänen et al, 2007; Lipski et al, 2012)
Listeners’ perception of our non-salient tonal contrast was tested in two orientations via a passive oddball listening paradigm, as the switch between the standard and deviant within the same contrast may lead to different acoustic salience and subsequently asymmetrical perception (Law et al, 2013)
Summary
More than 60% of the world languages are tonal languages in which word-level pitch variations are used to distinguish meanings by signaling prosodic contrasts at syllable and/or word levels of linguistic representation (Yip, 2002; Maddieson, 2005). The investigation of tones, a suprasegmental feature, provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between listeners’ experience with cross-domain, time-varying pitch patterns and the (neural) processing of prosody on a lexical level. Pre-attentive Learning of Non-native Tones of speech perception, this study is among the first to examine how adult listeners process non-native tonal distinctions at the neural level and how changes in pitch direction are reflected in brain waves that can be measured using electroencephalography (EEG). Native speakers of a tonal language perceive lexical tones in a categorical manner (Gandour, 1978; Hallé et al, 2004; Content and Perwez, 2011), to other speech segments, and their tone perception is subject to abstract rules (e.g., tone sandhi) in their native phonological system (Hume and Johnson, 2001; Politzer-Ahles et al, 2016). Recent neuro-imaging studies confirm that native listeners process tones to other speech segments in the left hemisphere and with the activation of the left frontal operculum, which demonstrates that the phonological processing of suprasegmental units occurs near Broca’s area (Gandour et al, 2000; Brown-Schmidt and CansecoGonzalez, 2004; Xi et al, 2010)
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