The Comparative Fallacy in Tone Perception Studies

During the past few decades, linguists have been striving to investigate language-specific phenomena in addition to their efforts to construct a model of language processing in general. Psycholinguistic studies have been following the same trends by employing a comparative perspective in research on spoken-language processing by human listeners. The aim of this practice is to provide a unified account pertaining to all human listeners, and is therefore valid irrespective of the language which is listened to. It is true that universal characteristics of language processing can only be accurately observed cross-linguistically. However, Bley-Vroman (1983) warned that work aimed at classifying the development or the systematicity of learners' languages can be seriously sidetracked by a comparative approach or a reliance on the target language (TL) structure. Bley-Vroman contended that the interlanguage (IL) system " is worthy of study in its own right, and should not be taken just as a degenerate form of the target system " (p. 4). The comparative fallacy was originally defined by Bley-Vroman as " a comparison of the TL in order to study the structure of the IL " (p. 4). It must be noted that a reverse reliance on IL to study systematicity in the use of a given target language form can also potentially constitute another form of the comparative fallacy. This point is illustrated here by a study on the perception of tone by L2 learners of Chinese. In Culter and Chen's (1997) study, native Chinese speakers and non-native Chinese speakers whose native language (NL) was not a tonal language were asked to make homophone judgments on pairs of two-character words that were presented to them acoustically. In the mismatch condition, a two-character real word was quickly followed by a two-character nonword mismatch. The mismatched nonword item was created by altering one or more components of the second character of the nonword relative to the second character of the preceding real word (onset vowel, consonant, tone, or their combination). Homophone judgments by the native Chinese subjects were less accurate and slower when the only difference between a real word and its nonword mismatch was in tone, rather than in segmental information. Culter and Chen thus came up with a tentative assumption that tone and segmental information (vowel) differ in their temporal availability in language processing. The tonal information is available relatively late when compared to segmental information in a task where attention to …