The Diversity of Tone Languages and the Roles of Pitch Variation in Non-tone Languages: Considerations for Tone Perception Research

Lexical tone and pitch perception in tone and non-tone language speakers

Past research on categorical perception of lexical tone has produced contradictory results. In Experiment 1 tonal (Mandarin, Vietnamese) and non-tonal (Australian) adults were tested for identification and discrimination on speech and non-speech (sine-wave) tone continua. Tonal language speakers’ category boundaries and discrimination peaks were near the middle of the asymmetric continuum, wher...

Congenital Amusia (or Tone-Deafness) Interferes with Pitch Processing in Tone Languages

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects music processing and that is ascribed to a deficit in pitch processing. We investigated whether this deficit extended to pitch processing in speech, notably the pitch changes used to contrast lexical tones in tonal languages. Congenital amusics and matched controls, all non-tonal language speakers, were tested for lexical tone discrimina...

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

efl students gender and socioeconomic status: the use of politeness strategies in the first and second languages

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...

Tone and Phonation in Southeast Asian Languages