PERCEPTION OF MANDARIN TONES BY CHINESE- AND ENGLISH-SPEAKING LISTENERS

Tsan Huang
SUNY at Buffalo, Department of Linguistics

ID 1447
[full paper]

This paper reports on two experiments that tested the hypothesis that native phonology may influence speech perception. Both experiments used natural speech tokens of Standard Mandarin tones and Chinese- and American English-speaking listeners. The results from both the AX discrimination and the degree of difference rating experiments show language-specific effects: the Chinese-speaking listeners’ tone perception space was warped due to tone sandhi processes that neutralize two otherwise contrastive lexical tones. On the other hand, the English-speaking listeners showed phonetic listening, paying more attention to the similarity in pitch offset and onset between a pair of tones.

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