Tsao, F.-M. (2008). The effect of acoustical similarity on lexical-tone perception of one-year-old Mandarin-learning infants. Chinese Journal of Psychology. 50 (2), 111–124.
Presentation: Chris
Summary: Sarah
While a great number of studies looked into infants’ discriminability of phoneme contrasts in either their native or non-native languages, relatively scant studies focused on the perception of tones by infants. In this regard, the present study aims to investigate how Mandarin infants perceive lexical tonal contrasts in their native language. Specifically, the effect of acoustical similarity is of interest. Among the four lexical tones in Mandarin, T1 and T3 are the most dissimilar tonal pair, T2 and T3 are the most similar one, and T2 and T4 fall in between. It is therefore predicted that infants should be able to discriminate T1 and T3 the best, followed by T2 and T4, and finally T2 and T3, if the effect of acoustical similarity matters. A total of 109 12-month-old infants were recruited and randomly assigned to one of the three tonal pair conditions. The head-turning paradigm was adopted. Each tonal pair was further divided into two conditions, so that while one tone in the pair was the target, the other would be the background. Results showed that the T1/T3 pair was discriminated better than the other two pairs by infants. In addition, within this pair, T3 was even more accurately recognized than T1. The findings of this study illustrated that acoustical similarity did influence how tonal contrasts were perceived by one-year-old native Mandarin infants. Nonetheless, contradictory to the prediction, the T2/T4 pair was not perceived significantly better than the T2/T3 pair. The author thus suggested that Mandarin infants rely much on average pitch height, which is actually similar between T2 and T4. As for the asymmetry of T3 being recognized better than T1, it was suspected that the auditory forward masking is at play. In other words, it is easier to sense contour tones against the background of level tones than the other way around. However, more studies should be conducted with respect to this point.
