Native speakers of tonal languages experience difficulty learning languages with different lexical tone inventories
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INSUFFICIENT LEANING
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Retrieved studies indicate that native tone inventories influence pitch perception and prosodic transfer, but direct evidence confirming that native tonal speakers systematically struggle with new tone inventories is limited and partial.
Extensive research has explored the perception of English lexical stress by Chinese EFL learners and tried to unveil the underlying mechanism of the prosodic transfer from a native tonal language to a non-native stress language. However, the role of the pitch as the shared cue by lexical stress and lexical tone during the transfer remains controversial when the segmental cue (i.e., reduced vowel) is absent. By employing event-related potential (ERP) measurements, the current study aimed to further investigate the role of the pitch during the prosodic transfer from L1 lexical tone to L2 lexical stress and the underlying neural responses. Two groups of adult Chinese EFL learners were compared, as both Mandarin and Cantonese are tonal languages with different levels of complexity. The results showed that Cantonese speakers relied more than Mandarin speakers on pitch cues, not only in their processing of English lexical stress but also in word recognition. Our findings are consistent with the arguments of Cue Weighting and attest to the influence of native tonal language experience on second language acquisition. The results may have implications on pedagogical methods that pitch could be an important clue in second language teaching.
Language experience has often shown to affect speech perception at segmental levels (Holt, 2010). Whether and how language experience affect perception of suprasegmental elements is often subject to dispute (Xu et al., 2006; Peng, 2016). The current study focused on the identification and discrimination of Mandarin lexical tones by 3 groups of listeners, namely, 15 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (tonal language), 15 native speakers of Lao (tonal language), and 15 native speakers of Uzbek (non-tonal language). We ask (1) whether experience with lexical tones (tonal vs. non-tonal) affects categorical perception of pitch contours; (2) whether differences in native tone inventories (Mandarin vs. Lao) affect pitch perception. Stimuli were 7 monosyllabic snippets resynthesized from a natural Mandarin speech sample. The stimuli represented a physical continuum of pitch contours ranging from a Mandarin level to a Mandarin rising tone. Preliminary results show a strong categorical perception of pitch contours for Mandarin speakers than for Lao and Uzbek speakers, and Lao speakers exhibited stronger categorical perception of pitch contours than Uzbek speakers. The results indicate that lexical tone perception is affected by both the experience with tonal languages and one’s native tone inventory.
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This book addresses important issues of speech processing and language learning in Chinese. It highlights perception and production of speech in healthy and clinical populations and in children and adults. This book provides diverse perspectives and reviews of cutting-edge research in past decades on how Chinese speech is processed and learned. Along with each chapter, future research directions have been discussed. With these unique features and the broad coverage of topics, this book appeals to not only scholars and students who study speech perception in preverbal infants and in children and adults learning Chinese, but also to teachers with interests in pedagogical applications in teaching Chinese as Second Language.
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