Statistical learning of a tonal language: the influence of bilingualism and previous linguistic experience.

Tianlin Wang,Jenny R Saffran

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00953

Abstract

While research shows that adults attend to both segmental and suprasegmental regularities in speech, including syllabic transitional probabilities as well as stress and intonational patterns, little is known about how statistical learning operates given input from tonal languages. In the current study, we designed an artificial tone language to address several questions: can adults track regularities in a tonal language? Is learning enhanced by previous exposure to tone-marking languages? Does bilingualism affect learning in this task? To address these questions, we contrasted the performance of English monolingual adults (Experiment 1), Mandarin monolingual and Mandarin–English bilingual adults (Experiment 2), and non-tonal bilingual adults (Experiment 3) in a statistical learning task using an artificial tone language. The pattern of results suggests that while prior exposure to tonal languages did not lead to significant improvements in performance, bilingual experience did enhance learning outcomes. This study represents the first demonstration of statistical learning of an artificial tone language and suggests a complex interplay between prior language experience and subsequent language learning.

Highlights

An important component of learning a new language is segmenting words from the speech stream
While the Mandarin monolinguals performed better than chance, a t-test comparing the Mandarin and English monolingual groups suggests that experience with lexical tones did not facilitate the detection of structure in the tonal artificial language [t(46) = 0.49, p = 0.626]
In order to explore the potential effect of more variable language experience on word segmentation in a new language, we used an independent samples t-test to compare the performance of two Mandarin-speaking groups

Summary

Introduction

An important component of learning a new language is segmenting words from the speech stream. In syllable–tone languages, pitch variations function in a phonemic manner to distinguish lexical meanings at the syllabic level; these languages employ lexical tones or pitch variations to denote different meanings at the suprasegmental level (e.g., Yip, 2002; Burnham and Mattock, 2007). These pitch contrasts occur regardless of their syntactic or morphological status. It is currently unclear how cues to word boundaries are weighted in languages that utilize both segmental and suprasegmental information

Methods

Results

Conclusion