Categorical Perception Of Mandarin Tones Research Articles

The effect of instrumental and vocal musical experience on tone categorical perception in individuals in a Chinese dialect area

IntroductionPrevious studies have shown that music training modulates adults’ categorical perception of Mandarin tones. However, the effect of music training on tone categorical perception ability in individuals in Chinese dialect areas remains unclear.MethodsWe recruited three groups of college students majoring in music in Chongqing, a dialect area in southwestern China. These groups included an instrumental music group (n = 31), a vocal music group (n = 32), and an instrumental-vocalist music group (n = 30). Additionally, we recruited a group of college students who did not receive any music training (n = 32). The accuracy and reaction time of the four groups were measured using the oddball task and compared to explore the differences in their tone categorical perception ability.ResultsConsidering both between-tone category and within-tone category, the three music groups showed both greater accuracy and shorter reaction times than the non-music group. Regarding the three music groups, no significant differences in accuracy and reaction time were detected between the instrumental and vocal groups. However, the instrumental vocalist group outperformed both the instrumental and vocal groups in terms of accuracy and reaction time.DiscussionResults showed that music training seems to have a positive effect on the categorical perception of Mandarin tone categories in Chinese dialect areas, and demonstrated that the combination of instrumental and vocal music training can further enhance tone categorical perception. To some extent, these findings provide a theoretical basis for the improvement of individual tone perception ability in dialect areas, and provided theoretical support for music and language education.

Categorical perception of Mandarin tones in neurotypical adults with subclinical autistic traits

Early studies have revealed that categorical speech perception is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. However, it remains unclear whether categorical speech perception ability is associated with subclinical autistic traits in neurotypical populations. The current study sought to address this question by examining categorical perception of Mandarin tones (T1, high-level; T4, falling) in young adults. One hundred and thirty-one college students were recruited to participate in two classic categorical perception task, identification and discrimination, and to fill in the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) for measuring subclinical autistic traits. The results showed that identification slope and categorical boundary width were not significantly correlated with the overall AQ score and the scores of the five subscales. However, between-category discrimination accuracy was significantly correlated with the social subscale score, indicating that individuals with less social skills have heightened between-category discrimination ability. Possible theoretical and practical implications of this association in subclinical populations are discussed. The current study adds to a better understanding of the associations between subclinical autistic traits and categorical speech perception in neurotypical individuals. [Work supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Ministry of Education of China 20YJCZH079.]

Age-Related Differences of Mandarin Tone and Consonant Aspiration Perception in Babble Noise.

This study investigated the categorical perception of Mandarin tones and consonant aspiration contrasts in babble noise among adults and adolescents aged 12-14 years, and explored the association between working memory and categorical perception. Twenty-four adults and 20 adolescents with Mandarin as their native language were recruited. Their performances of phonemic identification and discrimination in babble noise and quiet conditions, digit span tasks, and nonword repetition were assessed. Results indicated that, firstly, in the noise condition, both adults and adolescents showed wider boundary widths and lower between-category accuracies when perceiving aspiration of consonants than in the quiet condition, and the categorical boundary of tone perception in adolescents showed a transitional tendency toward Tone 1. Secondly, discrimination of consonant aspiration in adolescents needed to be further developed. Lastly, the accuracy of nonword repetition in adolescents was lower than that in adults, and adults with better auditory verbal working memory had better performance on tone perception. Our results provided evidence that tone perception is acquired easier than consonant aspiration perception, and tone perception is more robust and less susceptible to noise interference. Categorical perception performance relates to the capacity and utilization of auditory verbal working memory in some ways.

Effects of Cognitive Load on the Categorical Perception of Mandarin Tones.

Purpose This study investigated the effect of cognitive load (CL) on the categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin lexical tones to discuss the application of the generalized pulse-skipping hypothesis. This hypothesis assumes that listeners might miss/skip temporal pulses and lose essential speech information due to CL, which consequently affects both the temporal and spectral dimensions of speech perception. Should CL decrease listeners' pitch sensitivity and impair the distinction of tone categories, this study would support the generalized pulse-skipping hypothesis. Method Twenty-four native Mandarin-speaking listeners were recruited to complete a dual-task experiment where they were required to identify or discriminate tone stimuli while concurrently memorizing six Chinese characters or graphic symbols. A no-load condition without a memory recall task was also included as a baseline condition. The position of categorical boundary, identification slope, between- and within-category discrimination, and discrimination peakedness were compared across the three conditions to measure the impact of CL on tone perception. The recall accuracy of Chinese characters and graphic symbols was used to assess the difficulty of memory recall. Results Compared with the no-load condition, both load conditions showed a boundary shift to Tone 3, shallower identification slope, poorer between-category discrimination, and lower discrimination peakedness. Within-category discrimination was negatively affected by CL in the graphic symbol condition only, not in the Chinese character condition. Conclusions CL degraded listeners' sensitivity to subtle fundamental frequency changes and impaired CP of Mandarin lexical tones. This provides support for the generalized pulse-skipping hypothesis. Besides, the involvement of lexical information modulated the effect of CL.

音乐训练对4~5岁幼儿普通话声调范畴感知能力的影响

音乐训练对4~5岁幼儿普通话声调范畴感知能力的影响

Effects of language experience and sentential context in categorical perception of Mandarin tones

Previous research shows that sentential context plays an important role in lexical tone recognition when the fundamental frequency is degraded by noise or flattened. The present study aimed to test how language experience and sentence context would jointly influence the categorical perception of Mandarin tones. Thirty native Chinese speakers and thirty CFL (Chinese-as-a-foreign-language) learners participated in the study. The experimental protocol used identification and discrimination tasks for categorical perception of the synthetic tone2-tone3 continuum. Experimental conditions included the target tones in isolation and the same tones embedded in initial, medial and final position of sentences. The location, slope, and width of the phonetic boundary in identification function and the discrimination accuracy were assessed. The categorical perception test results indicated strong influences of language experience and sentential context, which has important pedagogical implications for second language learners.

Influence of L1 Background on Categorical Perception of Mandarin Tones by Russian and Vietnamese Listeners

This study investigated the influence of L1 background on categorical perception of lexical tones by three language groups, namely native Mandarin, Russian and Vietnamese listeners. Tone identification and discrimination scores of two tone continua (T1-T2 and T1-T4) were measured for each participant. Results showed that the two tone language groups, i.e., Mandarin and Vietnamese listeners, perceived both tone continua categorically whereas the non-tone language group, i.e., Russian listeners, did not. More specifically, while the Russian group exhibited significantly broader identification boundaries and performed near chance level in discrimination tasks, the Mandarin and Vietnamese groups presented sharp slopes in identification curves and corresponding discrimination peaks at the cross-boundary positions. Moreover, Mandarin and Vietnamese listeners showed slightly different discrimination curves, which could be attributed to the effect of their different tone inventories. The current findings suggest that native tone language background, to some extent, can facilitate non-native tone perception.

Categorical perception of Mandarin tones by Cantonese trilingual children

It is generally argued that children’s tone perception gradually becomes adult-like after age 6. In addition, previous studies suggest that stimulus duration, vowel quality, and musical training significantly contribute to categorical perception of pitch directions in both tonal and non-tonal language (Chen et al., 2017; Zhao & Kuhl, 2015). However, little is known about how musical training may shape categorical perception of trilingual children, and how stimulus duration and vowel quality come into play. In this paper, we investigate these effects on the categorical perception of Mandarin tones based on Cantonese trilingual children. Specifically, we created rising and falling Mandarin continua on high and low vowels with three duration values. Based on some pilot data, the vowel quality plays a vital role in the categorical perception of rising tones but not in the falling tone pitch directions. Children with professional musical training show much more categorical perception than children without musical training. Specifically, musically trained children show more between-category discrimination than within-category discrimination. Moreover, they are more sensitive to stimulus and are faster in terms of reaction time. Our findings will be compared with previous studies on categorical perception by adults and all significant effects will be discussed.

Aging effects on categorical perception of Mandarin tones in noise

The current study aimed at investigating the aging effect on the categorical perception of Mandarin lexical tones with varied fundamental frequency (F0) contours in noise. Mandarin tone identification and tone discrimination in quiet and noise were measured for younger and older listeners in a categorical perception paradigm where the stimuli continua varied their F0 contour systematically from the level to the rising/falling tones. Results reported that older listeners, in contrast with their younger counterparts, performed with less stimulus-tuned changes in both identification and discrimination functions and smaller peakedness in the discrimination function for both level-rising and level-falling tones. The aging effects on Mandarin tone categoricality were observed in both quiet and noise. Moreover, noise aggravated the aging effects, especially with the high SNR condition. Plus, older listeners’ identification and discrimination functions in CP paradigm positively correlated with their performance in general speech identification in noise; such correlation was not found with younger listeners. Our study suggested that older listeners had less categoricality in both identification and discrimination functions for the level-rising and level-falling tones, probably due to the aging-related decline in temporal processing.

Aging Effect on Categorical Perception of Mandarin Tones 2 and 3 and Thresholds of Pitch Contour Discrimination.

The purpose of the study was to examine the aging effect on the categorical perception of Mandarin Chinese Tone 2 (rising F0 pitch contour) and Tone 3 (falling-then-rising F0 pitch contour) as well as on the thresholds of pitch contour discrimination. Three experiments of Mandarin tone perception were conducted for younger and older listeners with Mandarin Chinese as the native language. The first 2 experiments were in the categorical perception paradigm: tone identification and tone discrimination for a series of stimuli, the F0 contour of which systematically varied from Tone 2 to Tone 3. In the third experiment, the just-noticeable differences of pitch contour discrimination were measured for both groups. In the measures of categorical perception, older listeners showed significantly shallower slopes in the tone identification function and significantly smaller peakedness in the tone discrimination function compared with younger listeners. Moreover, the thresholds of pitch contour discrimination were significantly higher for older listeners than for younger listeners. These results suggest that aging reduced the categoricality of Mandarin tone perception and worsened the psychoacoustic capacity to discriminate pitch contour changes, thereby possibly leading to older listeners' difficulty in identifying Tones 2 and 3.

The categorical perception of Mandarin tones by children with speech development disorders

Objective To investigate the perception of Mandarin′s tones by children with speech development disorders so as to provide a theoretical basis for clinical rehabilitation. Methods Thirty children with speech development disorders (DPDs) aged 4 to 6 were matched with 30 healthy counterparts as a control group. Both groups underwent the tone perception experiment, which included tone identification and discrimination tasks. The speech stimuli were 11 computer-simulated voices expressing a continuum of sounds from Mandarin speech ranging from /ba/ to /ba/. The two groups were compared in their ability to identify and differentiate the tones. Results Both groups showed typical S-shaped identification curves in a category pattern. The category boundaries of the control group were between stimulus steps 6 and 7, significantly different from those of the experimental group where the boundary fell between stimulus steps 5 and 6. On the distinguishing curve, both groups presented obvious peak values. The stimulus steps of the peaks and the crossing points of the identification curves were consistent. In addition, the average absolute value (b1) of the identification curve and the peaks′ degree of steepness (DP) of the DPD group′s distinguishing curve were significantly lower than those of the control group. At the same time, the average boundary width (Wcb) was significantly higher than that of the control group. Conclusion Children with speech development disorders perceive Mandarin tones with categories different from those of normal children. They may have difficulty in perceiving tones, which might be an important factor leading to pronunciation errors. Key words: Tones; Speech development; Categorical perception; Mandarin

The development of categorical perception of Mandarin tones in four- to seven-year-old children.

To track the course of development in children's fine-grained perception of Mandarin tones, the present study explored how categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin tones emerges along age among 70 four- to seven-year-old children and 16 adults. Prominent discrimination peaks were found for both the child and the adult groups, and they were well aligned with the corresponding identification crossovers. Moreover, six-year-olds showed a much narrower width (i.e. a sharper slope) compared to younger children, and have already acquired adult-like identification competence of Mandarin high-level and mid-rising tones. Although the ability to discriminate within-category tone pairs did not change, the between-category discrimination accuracies were positively correlated with chronological ages among child participants. We assume that the perceptual refinement of Mandarin tones in young children may be driven by an accumulation of perceptual development from the tonal information of the ambient sound input.

Categorical perception of Mandarin tones by Chinese-native, English-native and Chinese-as-a-second-language English listeners

Previous research found that native-Chinese listeners perceive tones more categorically than listeners with no knowledge of a tonal language (naïve listeners; Hallé et al., 2004). This study examined tone perception by 26 native-English adult learners of Mandarin (L2ers) in comparison to 30 naïve and 30 native-Chinese listeners. Identification and AXB discrimination tasks tested monosyllables (/pi/, /pa/) with 9-step F0 continua between all possible Mandarin tone pairs. Native listeners showed more categorical identification (steeper slopes) than naïve listeners. The L2 group showed significantly shallower identification slopes than native listeners (p<0.01) and steeper slopes than naïve listeners (p<0.01). L2 proficiency (listening test plus self-report) positively correlated with identification performance (r = 0.36, z=-2.56, p<0.01), suggesting higher proficiency may lead to more native-like tone identification. However, although L2ers’ discrimination accuracy (0.90) was significantly higher than native listeners’ (0.82; z = -4.76, p<. 001), it did not differ significantly from naïve listeners’ (0.90; z = -0.61, p = 0.54), suggesting that the non-native groups discriminated tone pair continua in a similar way. Tone pairs involving level tones (e.g., T1-T3) showed more categorical patterns than those involving two contour tones (e.g., T2-T3) in each group, consistent with the Anchor Hypothesis (Xu et al., 2006).

The influence of language experience on categorical perception of Mandarin tones

The influence of language experience on categorical perception of Mandarin tones

Context Effect in the Categorical Perception of Mandarin Tones

The categorical perception of tones is based not only on word-internal F0 cues but also on external F0 cues in the contexts. The present study focuses on the effects of different types of preceding contexts on Mandarin tone perception. In the experiment, subjects were required to identify a target tone with the preceding context. The target tone was from a tone continuum ranging from Mandarin Tone 1 (high-level tone) to Tone 2 (mid-rising tone). It was preceded by four types of contexts (normal speech, reversal speech, fine-structure sound, and non-speech) with different mean F0 values. Results indicate that the categorical perception of Mandarin tones is influenced only by the normal speech context, and the effect is contrastive. For instance, in a normal speech context with a higher mean F0, the following tone is more likely to be perceived as a lower-frequency tone (Tone 2), whereas with a lower mean F0, the following tone is more likely to be perceived as a higher-frequency tone (Tone 1). These findings suggest that Mandarin tone normalization is mediated by speech-specific processes and that the speech context needs to be intelligible.

Impaired categorical perception of lexical tones in Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics

The degree to which cognitive resources are shared in the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones remains uncertain. Testing Mandarin amusics on their categorical perception of Mandarin lexical tones may provide insight into this issue. In the present study, a group of 15 amusic Mandarin speakers identified and discriminated Mandarin tones presented as continua in separate blocks. The tonal continua employed were from a high-level tone to a mid-rising tone and from a high-level tone to a high-falling tone. The two tonal continua were made in the contexts of natural speech and of nonlinguistic analogues. In contrast to the controls, the participants with amusia showed no improvement for discrimination pairs that crossed the classification boundary for either speech or nonlinguistic analogues, indicating a lack of categorical perception. The lack of categorical perception of Mandarin tones in the amusic group shows that the pitch deficits in amusics may be domain-general, and this suggests that the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones may share certain cognitive resources and/or processes (Patel 2003, 2008, 2012).