Categorizing Mandarin Tones into Japanese Pitch-accent Categories: The Role of Phonetic Properties

This study examined how native Japanese speakers, who were naïve to Mandarin, categorized Mandarin tones (in citation form) into their native pitch–accent categories. Results showed that Japanese listeners categorized the nonnative Mandarin tones into their native pitch accent categories, in ways that were consistent with the phonetic features of listeners’ native language. The findings support the new assumption of PAM for suprasegmentals [14] that non-native prosodic categories (e.g., lexical tones) will be assimilated to the categories of listeners’ native prosodic system.