The Influence of Linguistic Background on Asymmetric Tone Perception Induced by Position of Context

Previous studies on categorical perception of lexical tones showed that perception of Cantonese lexical level tones depends on pitch level of contexts and the contextual effect is specific to speech. Moreover, a pair of stimuli with a right context is easier to discriminate than that with a left context. Although this directional asymmetric perception was observed from both native and nonnative tone language speakers, it is not clear yet whether such effect is also present in speakers without any tone experience. This paper investigates this question further by comparing the perception between native Cantonese speakers and French speakers on Cantonese level tones, which are presented in left and right contexts. The results suggest that the asymmetric effect is due to both language experience and general auditory processing. The second aim of this paper is to examine whether categorical perception of lexical tones also depends on lexical meaning of the syllable, by comparing the performance from native speakers on real speech (with valid lexical meaning) and pseudowords (without valid lexical meaning).