2009/02/19

Lee, Y.-S., Vakoch D. A., & Wurm L. (1996). Tone perception in Cantonese and Mandarin: a cross-linguistic comparison. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25(5), 527–542.

Presentation: Chris

Summary: Shelly

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of language background and lexical information on tone perception. Previous studies have found that both factors play important roles when subjects perceive tones. Subjects of different language backgrounds would pay attentions to different dimensions of tone. Speakers of non-tone language would attend more to tone height, while speakers of some tone languages to tone contour. In addition, it has also been found that the left hemisphere is in charge of processing tone, meaning tones are treated as segmental for the speakers of tone languages. To investigate the importance of the above two factors in more depth, the present study aims to see how these factors affect the effectiveness of tone discrimination. Experiment 1 used Cantonese stimuli, which were tone pairs of three kinds: lexical pairs with same phoneme and same tone, lexical pairs with same phoneme and different tones, lexical-nonlexical pairs with same phoneme and different tones. The tone pairs were present to the subjects in three ways: in immediate condition, first tone was immediately followed by the second tone, in delay condition, a 5-sec interval was inserted between the pair, and in counting condition, subjects were asked to repeatedly subtract three from the number shown on the screen. Subjects were native speakers of Cantonese, Taiwanese, or English, and were asked to judge whether the tones in a pair were the same or not, and in the mean time their reaction time was recorded. Results showed that the Cantonese group clearly had better performance than the other two groups, and only Cantonese group showed an advantage of lexical tones over non-lexical tones. Experiment 2 used stimuli of the same conditions as in Exp.1, only this time they were in Chinese. Results showed that Mandarin listeners did better than the other two groups, and Cantonese listeners did better than English listeners. To sum up, the present study showed that speakers’ linguistic background did influence their tone perception. Generally speaking, speakers of tone languages show an advantage over those of non-tone languages in discriminating tones. In addition, the effect of lexical is only significant for native speakers.