Francis, A. L., Ciocca, V., Ma, L., & Fenn, K. (2008). Perceptual learning of Cantonese lexical tones by tone and non-tone language speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 268–294.
It is always said that speakers’ native language experiences have a great impact on L2 acquisition. While most studies focused on segments in the past literature, this study aimed to investigate how L2 learners could be trained to distinguish suprasegmental signals. Specifically, the authors intended to see how Cantonese tones could be acquired by native speakers of Mandarin, a tone language, and by native speakers of English, a non-tone language, through perceptual learning. The experimental procedures included a pretest session, a training session, and a posttest session. There were two tasks involved: one was to identify the individual tones, and the other was to rate how different the two tones were. The overall results revealed that both Mandarin speakers and English speakers did improve in tonal identification after training. Moreover, difference score rating showed that language experience was indeed influential – Mandarin speakers were more sensitive to tones with direction changes, whereas English speakers distinguished tones with different heights better. The authors thus concluded that native language experience was a robust factor for L2 acquisition. Particularly for this study, it showed that although F0 curve was utilized differently in a tone and non-tone language, learners could still manage to map the corresponding patterns. When the correspondence between phonological categories exists, the non-native pattern would assimilate the native pattern. On the other hand, when there is no such correspondence, whether the non-native pattern would be recognized was then determined by the phonological organization of the native language.
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