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Evaluating the effects of perceptual training on the application of the Mandarin tone sandhi rules by English speakers
Author(s)
Date Issued
2019
Publisher
The Open University of Hong Kong
ISBN
9789888439607
Citation
Li, B., Yang, Y., & Chen, S. (2019). Evaluating the effects of perceptual training on the application of the Mandarin tone sandhi rules by English speakers. In OUHK (Ed.). 2018 International conference on bilingual learning and teaching e-proceedings. 2018 International conference on bilingual learning and teaching e-proceedings, Hong Kong (pp.134-140). The Open University of Hong Kong.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Application of the tone sandhi rules is a widely studied topic in speech production, but
the production data have rarely been perceptually evaluated. Meanwhile, whether
perceptual training improves speech production at the suprasegmental level remains a
question. Adopting the approach of perceptual evaluation, this study examines the effects of
perceptual training on the Mandarin tone sandhi rule application by ten American English
speakers. All the participants attended a pre-training recording session, a short-term
laboratory training session, and a post-training recording session. Ten native speakers of
Beijing Mandarin also participated in the recording as a control group. There were 192
target stimuli, with both real and wug words in each recording session. In the training
session, the participants were presented with auditory and visual inputs of Mandarin tone
sandhi rules, which were followed by an identification test to evaluate the training. Two
trained Mandarin-speaking linguists first manually segmented the target syllables,
normalized the intensity at 55 dB, anonymized the participants, and then performed the
perceptual evaluation of each target syllable on a 101-point scale. A significant effect of
perceptual training was found on the half-third sandhi rule, but not on the third tone sandhi.
The roles of familiarity (trained versus untrained words) and context (real versus wug words)
on the training effect were also investigated.
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