Presentation: Hsiao-chien
Summary: Chris
This study aimed to explore the nature of perceptual processing of tonal information and to make a direct comparison with segmental perception. Speeded-response tasks were conducted, in which subjects had to make lexical decision on disyllabic Cantonese items. These items were constructed from real Cantonese words with the second syllable undergoing some alternation, be it onset, rhyme, or tone. Experiment 1 was designed to test which information was crucial to word recognition in Cantonese. Results showed that tonal mismatch elicited the highest error rate, followed by vowel mismatch. Syllables that differed in onset and tone were the easiest type. In the tone condition, there was a tendency for Tone 1 to have lower error rates compared to other tones. The goal of Experiment 2 was to assess the order in which perceptual information becomes available to native listeners and the speed with which a fairly distinct and a fairly non-distinct tonal difference can be perceived. A same-different judgment task was used. The test material contained two conditions: distinct (high-falling Tone 1 vs. mid-rising Tone 2) and non-distinct (low-falling Tone 4 vs. low-rising Tone 5), where distinctiveness depended on whether the tones of a pair had similar onset F0. Results showed that responses to stimuli that were in the distinct condition were significantly faster than those in the non-distinct condition. However, it was not sure whether the results had linguistic implication or were just acoustic in nature. Hence, Experiment 3 tested Dutch non-native speakers of Cantonese. Results were similar to Experiment 2. These results showed that in Cantonese, many tonal discriminations were hard to make, both for native speakers and non-native speakers. When distinctive tonal information occurs early, perceptual processing would be more efficient. However, tonal information does not usually arrive early since tones are primarily realized upon vowels and cannot be processed independently. Similar to the results in lexical stress languages, information is processed as soon as it becomes usable, but prosodic information may reach this state later than segments, which makes utilization of prosodic cues slower and more difficult than segmental cues in the process of word recognition.
