Tone perception in Cantonese and Mandarin: a cross-linguistic comparison

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Auditory Perception
• Speech Science

Background:

• Tone languages like Cantonese and Mandarin rely on pitch variations for meaning.
• Understanding how linguistic experience shapes auditory perception is crucial for language acquisition and processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of native language background on the perception of lexical and nonlexical tones in Cantonese and Mandarin.
• To examine how varying interstimulus intervals and interference levels affect tone discrimination.

Main Methods:

• Presented Cantonese and Mandarin tones (lexical and nonlexical) to native Cantonese, Mandarin, and English speakers.
• Subjects performed same-different judgments on tone pairs.
• Manipulated interstimulus interval duration and introduced backward counting as an interference task.

Main Results:

• Native speakers demonstrated superior tone discrimination for their own language's tones compared to non-native speakers.
• Tone discrimination accuracy decreased significantly under high interference (backward counting).
• Specific patterns of advantage were observed for Cantonese and Mandarin speakers discriminating tones from each language.

Conclusions:

• Linguistic experience plays a critical role in the fine-grained perception of tonal contrasts.
• Short-term memory encoding processes are susceptible to interference, impacting tone perception.
• Differences in tonal systems between Cantonese and Mandarin may contribute to observed discrimination patterns.