The Impact of Long-Term Chinese Dialect Use on Mandarin Tone Production and Perception: Evidence from Late...

Theoretical models of second language speech acquisition generally propose that a learner's ability to produce speech is closely linked to their perceptual representations. Although some studies have explored this phenomenon among learners from typologically distant backgrounds, empirical research on the acquisition of closely related, yet distinct, tonal systems remains limited. Addressing this gap, this study investigates Mandarin tone acquisition by late middle-aged native speakers of Puxian Min, a Southern Chinese dialect. This demographic is characterized by delayed, naturalistic Mandarin exposure and deeply entrenched native tonal habits. Specifically, the study investigates the production-perception relationship across different prosodic contexts, including monosyllabic words, the initial syllables of disyllabic words, and the final syllables of disyllabic words, by assessing tone production through a reading task and tone perception through a discrimination task. Results demonstrated that tonal realization was highly sensitive to prosodic structures, with targets in disyllabic words, especially in word-initial positions, yielding greater accuracy than isolated monosyllables. At the tonal categorical level, T1 and T4 proved robust, whereas T3 emerged as the most vulnerable category, frequently merging with T2. Crucially, overall statistical analyses confirmed a moderate positive alignment between learners' tone production and perception. These findings highlight the interaction between tone production and perception, suggesting that long-term exposure to Chinese dialects may shape the cognitive representation of Mandarin tonal categories. This study offers valuable insights into tone acquisition in language contact situations and has implications for future research on second language phonological development.