Kirby, J. (2010). Dialect experience in Vietnamese tone perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127(6), 3749–3757.
Presentation: Chris
Summary: Shelly
While speakers from different dialects may utilize different features for contrasting the same phonemes or tones, these differences do not seem to cause great impairment to mutual intelligibility between the dialects. This raises the question of whether or to what extent differences in production between dialects are indicative of differences in perception. The present study examined this issue by investigating the perception on tones in Northern Vietnamese (NVN) of both listeners from Northern and Southern Vietnamese (SVN). The cues to tonal contrasts in the two dialects have been shown to be different. NVN contains six tones, distinguished by F0 and voice quality, while SVN contains only five, distinguished just by F0. In the study of Brunelle (2009), it was found that such differences in dialect experiences indeed tune listeners to different cues, where NVN listeners are more sensitive to voice quality cues than are SVN listeners. However, since the paradigm used by Brunelle (2009) was an offline identification task, in which listeners might have enough time to access lexical information when making responses, the potential differences in prelinguistic processing might be obscured. Therefore, the present study employed a speeded online AX discrimination paradigm, attempting to assess listeners’ sensitivity to lower-level acoustic-phonetic information. Stimuli were syllables of different tonal pairs in NVN, on which listeners were asked to decide as soon as possible whether they were the same or different. Analyses on perceptual space and reaction time showed that tonal pairs with laryngealization were indeed much more confusable, and required more time to process for SVN listeners. Hierarchical clustering analyses further pointed out that SVN listeners tended to cluster laryngealized tones together. Nevertheless, it was also noted that, SVN listeners still showed some sensitivity to voice quality, an unfamiliar cue to SVN, when differentiating tones with and without it, but still, the saliency was lower than that to NVN listeners. Results reported in this study showed that listeners from different dialects are attuned to different cues. Therefore, the effect of dialect experience on tone processing at prelinguistic level can be confirmed.
