Work

Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners

Year: 2011

Type: article

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.

Source: Phonetica

DOI: 10.1159/000327392

Authors: Tsan Huang, Keith Johnson

Institutions: University at Buffalo, State University of New York, University of California, Berkeley

Language: English

Topic: Phonetics and Phonology Research

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: Ohio State University, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

Award: G7576202173