Phonetic and Lexical Effects on Speech Perception of Falling Tones
نویسندگان
چکیده
This study investigates phonetic and lexical effects on speech perception of high-falling tones and low-falling tones in Hakka and Mandarin. An identification task and a lexical decision task were conducted on 30 participants for each language. The results illustrate that onset pitch and pitch drop are more crucial phonetic attributes than offset pitch for native speakers to distinguish high-falling and low-falling tones. In addition, lexical effects have been found to exert a significant influence on tonal perception. The findings suggest that a model of speech processing should consider phonetic and lexical knowledge, both low-level and high-level representations, as cognitive fundaments.
منابع مشابه
The Effect of Tone Sandhi on Speech Perception of Taiwanese Falling Tones
This study investigates phonetic and lexical effects on speech perception of two Taiwanese tones: high-falling and lowfalling, and suggests that tone sandhi also plays a role. A tonal identification task and a lexical task were conducted on 30 Taiwanese speakers. The results show that onset pitch and pitch drop are more crucial than offset pitch to the contrast of the two falling tones, and par...
متن کاملCategorizing Mandarin tones into listeners' native prosodic categories: the role of phonetic properties
Studies have shown that assimilating non-native tones to the categories of listeners’ native prosodic systems (e.g., tone, pitch-accent, and intonation) seems to be feasible (So, 2006; So and Best, 2008; So and Best, in press), and is consistent with the assumptions of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best, 1995, PAM). This raises an important question as to how adults perceive non-native lex...
متن کاملPerception of Mandarin Tones by Chinese- and English-speaking Listeners
This paper reports on two experiments that tested the hypothesis that native phonology may influence speech perception. Both experiments used natural speech tokens of Standard Mandarin tones and Chineseand American Englishspeaking listeners. The results from both the AX discrimination and the degree of difference rating experiments show language-specific effects: the Chinese-speaking listeners’...
متن کاملPerceptual Improvement of Lexical Tones in Infants: Effects of Tone Language Experience
To learn words in a tonal language, tone-language learners should not only develop better abilities for perceiving consonants and vowels, but also for lexical tones. The divergent trend of enhancing sensitivity to native phonetic contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrast is theoretically essential to evaluate effects of listening to an ambient language on speech percepti...
متن کاملCross-language perception of non-native tonal contrasts: effects of native phonological and phonetic influences.
This study examined the perception of the four Mandarin lexical tones by Mandarin-naïve Hong Kong Cantonese, Japanese, and Canadian English listener groups. Their performance on an identification task, following a brief familiarization task, was analyzed in terms of tonal sensitivities (A-prime scores on correct identifications) and tonal errors (confusions). The A-prime results revealed that t...
متن کامل