Wang, Y., Jongman, A., Sereno, J. A. (2003) Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of Mandarin tone productions before and after perceptual training. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113(2), 1003–1043.
Presentation: Chris
Summary: Sarah
Previous studies on tonal perception have shown that English listeners’ tonal perception is significantly improved after a series of perceptual training. Nevertheless, whether this training effect could also be transferred to their tonal production remains unknown. This study thus aims to investigate whether mere perceptual training would lead to an improvement on English listeners’ tonal production. Sixteen native American English listeners were recruited as participants. The experiment adopted the pre-test/post-test paradigm, in which listeners’ tonal production was recorded before and after training. Half of the listeners received perceptual training, while the other half did not. To evaluate the production accuracy, 80 native Mandarin speakers were asked to identify the tonal categories produced by English listeners in both the pre-test and the post-test. It was found that listeners with perceptual training showed more significant improvements than those without training, across all four tonal types. Acoustic analyses were also conducted on the tonal production of those English listeners who received training. Compared with Mandarin speakers’ production, results showed that English listeners’ production in the post-test better approximated that of Mandarin speakers. Moreover, the improvement was more salient on pitch contour than pitch height. The findings in this study again verified the effectiveness of perceptual training on non-native listeners, and this further indicated that this effect could be shown not only on perception, but also on production.
