Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners
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Tsan Huang
Abstract
The results reported in this paper indicate that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese rate the perceptual similarities among the lexical tones of Mandarin differently than do native speakers of American English. Mandarin listeners were sensitive to tone contour while English listeners attended to pitch levels. Chinese listeners also rated tones that are neutralized by phonological tone sandhi rules in Mandarin as more similar to each other than did English speakers – indicating a role of phonology in determining perceptual salience. In two further experiments, we found that some of these differences were eliminated when the listening task focused listeners’ attention on the auditory properties of the stimuli, but, interestingly, a degree of language specificity remained even in the most purely psychophysical listening tasks with speech stimuli.
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© 2010 S. Karger AG, Basel
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Further Section
- Contents Vol. 67, 2010
- Original Paper
- Differences in Base of Articulation for Consonants among Catalan Dialects
- The Interdependence of Tonal and Durational Cues in the Perception of Rhythmic Groups
- Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners
- In Memoriam
- Gösta Bruce
- Zongji Wu
- Ilse Lehiste
- Edda Farnetani
- Further Section
- Publications Received for Review
- Index autorum Vol. 67, 2010
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Further Section
- Contents Vol. 67, 2010
- Original Paper
- Differences in Base of Articulation for Consonants among Catalan Dialects
- The Interdependence of Tonal and Durational Cues in the Perception of Rhythmic Groups
- Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners
- In Memoriam
- Gösta Bruce
- Zongji Wu
- Ilse Lehiste
- Edda Farnetani
- Further Section
- Publications Received for Review
- Index autorum Vol. 67, 2010
