Abstract
To learn words in a tonal language, tone-language learners should not only develop better abilities for perceiving consonants and vowels, but also for lexical tones. The divergent trend of enhancing sensitivity to native phonetic contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrast is theoretically essential to evaluate effects of listening to an ambient language on speech perception development. The loss of sensitivity in discriminating lexical tones among non-tonal language-learning infants was apparent between 6 and 12 months of age, but only few studies examined trends of differentiating native lexical tones in infancy. The sensitivity in discriminating lexical tones among 6–8 and 10–12 month-old Mandarin-learning infants (n = 120) was tested in Experiment 1 using three lexical tone contrasts of Mandarin. Facilitation of linguistic experience was shown in the tonal contrast (Tone 1 vs. 3), but both age groups performed similar in the other two tonal contrasts (Tone 2 vs. 4; Tone 2 vs. 3). In Experiment 2, 6–8 and 10–12 month-old Mandarin-learning infants (n = 90) were tested with tonal contrasts that have pitch contours either similar to or inverse from lexical tones in Mandarin, and perceptual improvement was shown only in a tonal contrast with familiar pitch contours (i.e., Tone 1 vs. 3). In Experiment 3, 6–8 and 10–12 month-old English-learning infants (n = 40) were tested with Tone 1 vs. 3 contrast of Mandarin and showed an improvement in the perception of non-native lexical tones. This study reveals that tone-language learning infants develop more accurate representations of lexical tones around their first birthday, and the results of both tone and non-tone language-learning infants imply that the rate of development depends on listening experience and the acoustical salience of specific tone contrasts.
Highlights
Perceptual sensitivity to consonants and vowels undergoes rapid changes during the first year of life
An Age × Contrast two-way ANOVA of the percentage of correct responses revealed that 10–12-month-old Mandarinlearning infants (M = 69.86%, SD = 12.96) performed better than their 6–8-month-old counterparts (M = 59.64%, SD = 5.74), F(1,114) = 51.22, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.310
The result that Tone 1 vs. 3 contrast, the acoustically more distinct contrast, is easier than other tonal contrasts for infants to distinguish, suggests that acoustical salience between tonal contrasts affects the developmental trends of native lexical tone perception
Summary
Perceptual sensitivity to consonants and vowels undergoes rapid changes during the first year of life. The developmental trends of infants distinguishing consonants and vowels from both native and foreign languages are welldocumented (Werker et al, 2012), but only few studies have explored the developmental trajectories of lexical tones in nontonal language-learning infants (Mattock and Burnham, 2006; Mattock et al, 2008; Yeung et al, 2013; Liu and Kager, 2014; Singh and Fu, 2016; Singh et al, 2016) It remains unclear whether infants learning a tonal language as their first language improve in their sensitivity in distinguishing lexical tones during the second half of their first year of life. The language-specific pattern of differentiating English /d/ vs. /ð/ contrast emerged later than 12 months of age, when 4-year-old English-speaking children performed better than French-speaking children of the same age in distinguishing the English /d/ vs. /ð/ contrast (Sundara et al, 2006)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
