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Dialect experience in Vietnamese tone perception.

James Kirby1

  • 1Department of Linguistics, Phonology Laboratory, University of Chicago, 1010 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA. jkirby@uchicago.edu

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|June 17, 2010
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Dialect experience shapes how Vietnamese speakers perceive tones. Northern listeners focus on pitch contours, while Southern listeners are sensitive to voice quality, influencing tone perception.

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Psychoacoustics
  • Phonetics

Background:

  • Vietnamese tones are phonemic and crucial for meaning.
  • Northern Vietnamese tones rely on pitch and voice quality, while Southern tones are pitch-only.
  • Listener's dialect may influence the perception of these tonal features.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the perceptual dimensions of Vietnamese tones.
  • To examine how dialect experience affects prelinguistic tone perception.
  • To compare Northern and Southern Vietnamese listeners' tonal perception.

Main Methods:

  • A speeded AX discrimination task was administered to 30 listeners (10 Northern, 20 Southern Vietnamese).
  • Stimuli were based on Northern Vietnamese tones.
  • Data analysis involved INDSCAL multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering.

Main Results:

  • Both listener groups perceived a three-dimensional tonal space (pitch offset, voice quality, contour type).
  • Southern listeners showed higher confusion for tones with nonmodal voice quality.
  • Northern listeners confused tones with similar pitch excursions more readily.
  • Perceptual similarity was influenced by primary dialect experience.

Conclusions:

  • Dialect experience significantly impacts the perceptual salience of acoustic cues in Vietnamese tones.
  • Listeners' primary dialect shapes their low-level perceptual similarity judgments for tones.
  • This highlights the interplay between linguistic experience and auditory perception.