Discrimination of Cantonese Tones by Speakers of Tone and Non-tone Languages

Discrimination of Cantonese Tones by Speakers of Tone and Non-tone Languages

Perceptual learning of Cantonese lexical tones by tone and non-tone language speakers

Two groups of listeners, one of native speakers of a tone language (Mandarin Chinese) and one of native speakers of a non-tone language (English) were trained to recognize Cantonese lexical tones. Performance before and after training was measured using closed response-set identification and pairwise difference rating tasks. Difference ratings were submitted to multidimensional scaling (MDS) an...

Visual discrimination of cantonese tone by tonal but non-Cantonese speakers, and by non-tonal language speakers

A previous study by the first two authors suggests there is visual information for tone perception: under certain conditions Cantonese speakers are able to identify spoken words as one of six Cantonese words differing only in tone on the basis of lip and face movements at a rate better than chance [1]. Here, non-native (tonal, Thai, and non-tonal, English) language speakers were tested on a dis...

Cantonese tone word learning by tone and non-tone language speakers

Adult non-native perception is subject to influence from a variety of factors, including native language experience. The present research examines the effect of linguistic experience on non-native tone perception and tone word learning. Native Thai and English-speaking participants completed seven sessions of lexical identification training on words distinguished by Cantonese tones. A tone iden...

Lexical tone production by Cantonese speakers with parkinson's disease

The aim of this study was to investigate lexical tone production in Cantonese speakers associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD speakers). The effect of intonation on the production of lexical tone was also examined. Speech data was collected from five Cantonese PD speakers. Speech materials consisted of targets contrasting in tones, embedded in different sentence contexts (initial, medial and f...