A Cross-linguistic Study of Taiwanese Tone Perception by Taiwanese and English Listeners

The present study investigated tone perception by speakers of Taiwanese Southern Min and those of American English with an AX discrimination task. Two Taiwanese Southern Min tone continua were constructed from natural speech stimuli. One continuum ranged from a high level tone (T55) to a mid level tone (T33), and the other from a high level (T55) to a high falling tone (T51). The results showed that perception by Taiwanese listeners was quasi-categorical for the contour-level tone continuum but mostly continuous for the level tone-level tone one. This suggests that the findings by Abramson (1979a, b) and Wang (1976) and Chan et al. (1975) should be seen as complementary to each other rather than contradictory. Differences on tone perception between Taiwanese and English listeners were also found. Taiwanese listeners exhibited a region of higher discriminability on the T55-T51 continuum, while no discrimination peak was observed in English listeners’ data. In addition, Taiwanese listeners were more accurate than English listeners in tone discrimination. These results indicate a qualitative difference in lexical tone perception between tone and nontone language listeners: tone language listeners appear to perceive tones as phonemic categories, utilizing cues such as pitch contour, while nontone language listeners rely more on psychoacoustic factors such as pitch height (cf. Hume and Johnson 2001; Hallé et al. 2004; Huang 2007; Huang and Johnson 2010).