Categorizing Mandarin tones into listeners’ native prosodic categories: The role of phonetic properties
-
Connie K. So
and
Catherine T. Best
Abstract
This study examined whether native speakers of non-tone languages (Australian English, and French) were able to perceive foreign Mandarin tones in a sentence environment according to their native prosodic categories. Results found that both English and French speakers were able to perceptually categorize foreign tones into their intonational categories (i-Categories), and that categorizations were based on the contextual phonetic similarities of the pitch contours they perceived between Mandarin tones and their native i-Categories. Results also showed that French speakers, but not English speakers, were able to detect the fine-detailed phonetic feature differences between Tone 3 and Tone 4 (low/falling tone vs. high-falling tone). The findings support a new extension of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM; Best 1995) to suprasegmental phonology (So and Best 2008): that non-native prosodic categories (e.g. lexical tones) will be assimilated to the categories of listeners’ native prosodic system (e.g. intonation). In addition, rhythmic differences among languages may also contribute to perception of non-native tones.
© School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 2011
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Articles in the same Issue
- Special issue on the acquisition of second language speech: Editors’ preface
- L2 speech learning in adulthood and phonological short-term memory
- Influential factors on the production of English /θ/ by Japanese learners of English
- Learner corpora and prosody: From the COREIL corpus to principles on data collection and corpus design
- Phonological aspects of the Longman communication 3000
- An OT account of the precedence relationship between perception and production in the acquisition of English stress
- I know [pɪlɪpɪno] but i say [fɪlɪpɪno]: An investigation into Filipino foregin domestic helpers’ influence on Hong Kong Chinese’s L2 English phonology acquisition
- Assessing FL pronunciation in a semi-immersion setting: The effects of CLIL instruction on Spanish-Catalan learners’ perceived comprehensibility and accentedness
- Interaction of intrinsic vowel and consonant durational correlates with foreigner directed speech
- L2 dialect acquisition of German vowels: The case of Northern German and Austrian dialects
- Categorizing Mandarin tones into listeners’ native prosodic categories: The role of phonetic properties
- Variability and systematicity in individual learners’ Japanese lexical accent
