Without conscious effort: The ability of nontonal language speakers to discriminate lexical and nonlexical tones

Abstract

Tonal language speakers perform well in discriminating lexical tones in their own language. However, it is unknown whether their proficiency extends to the nonlinguistic context. This study compared the accuracy of performance of Cantonese and English speakers on tonal discrimination tasks. The findings demonstrated that the Cantonese speakers performed better than the English speakers in discriminating lexical tones in the linguistic context, even when the stimuli could not be consciously perceived. Nevertheless, there was no significant performance difference between Cantonese and English speakers in discriminating nonlexical tones in the nonlinguistic context. The results demonstrate the excellence of the linguistic component to tolerate noise. Moreover, the contrastive findings obtained in this study suggest that the transferability of the experience with lexical tones to nonlinguistic activities can be highly contextualized.