Adult non-native perception is subject to influence from a variety of factors, including native language experience. The present research examines the effect of linguistic experience on non-native tone perception and tone word learning. Native Thai and English-speaking participants completed seven sessions of lexical identification training on words distinguished by Cantonese tones. A tone iden...

Aiming at better understanding of prosody generation by native Japanese learners of Mandarin as a second language (L2), we analyzed the syllable duration differences between tone types. By comparing the mean syllable durations and the variation of normalized syllable durations across tone types and speakers, significant differences were found between tone types as well as between speakers. Nati...

This paper presents our attempt to model physiological transition effect on syllable F0 contour in order to improve lexical tone recognition performance for Mandarin Chinese. We suggested that a syllable F0 contour consists of three segments: onset course, tone nucleus and offset course. Among the three segments, only tone nucleus contains key features for tone recognition, and the other two re...

This paper presents a novel approach to tone recognition in continuous Cantonese speech based on overlapped di-tone Gaussian mixture models (ODGMM). The ODGMM is designed with special consideration on the fact that Cantonese tone identification relies more on the relative pitch level than on the pitch contour. A di-tone unit covers a group of two consecutive tone occurrences. The tone sequence ...

Most of the world’s languages use both segment and lexical tone to distinguish word meanings. However, few studies on spoken recognition in show conflicting results concerning relative contribution (sub-)syllabic constituents, time course how segmental tonal information is utilised. In Experiments 1 & 2, participants listened monosyllabic Mandarin words with presence a phonological competitor, ...

This study examined the neural substrates underlying the implementation of phonological rule in lexical tone by the Tone 3 sandhi phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese. Tone 3 sandhi is traditionally described as the substitution of Tone 3 with Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 (33 →23) during speech production. Tone 3 sandhi enables the examination of tone processing in the phonological level wi...

The aim of this paper is to address an often-overlooked topic in Southern Min tonology: neutral tone. We show that the tone sandhi domain not always isomorphic with XP syntax or a phonological phrase. In fact, may be smaller than what has been predicted, as evidenced phrase-final functional morphemes well rhythmic effect. propose defined by constituent Tone Sandhi Domain (TSD, τ) between p-phra...

It is known that in Mandarin each of the five lexical tones can be assigned with an articulatorily functional target: [high] for tone 1, [rise] for tone 2, [low] for tone 3, [fall] for tone 4 and [mid] for tone 5 (the first four tones are known as full tones while tone 5 is called neutral tone). Given that the targets of full tones can change (e.g., from tone 3 to tone 2) in certain speech cond...

The third tone sandhi in Mandarin is a well-studied rule, where a Tone 3 followed by another Tone 3 is changed as a rising tone, similar to Tone 2. This Tone 3 sandhi rule is straightforward in disyllabic words, which is phonetically driven for the ease of production. In three or more than three syllables with Tone 3, however, the Tone 3 sandhi application is more complicated and involves both ...