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Linguistic experience and musical training in shaping Mandarin tone perception by trilingual non-native Cantonese listeners
Author(s)
Date Issued
2018
Citation
Chen, S., Yang, Y., Wayland, R., & Zhu, Y. (2018 Nov 5). Linguistic experience and musical training in shaping Mandarin tone perception by trilingual non-native Cantonese listeners.176th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and 2018 Acoustics Week in Canada, Victoria.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Mandarin tones are perceived categorically by native listeners, but not by non-native listeners (e.g., Francis et al., 2003; Halle et al.,2004; Xu et al., 2006). Vowel quality, stimulus duration, and language background also significantly contributed to categorical perception of tones among native and non-native listeners (Chen et al., 2017). In comparison to pitch production, it was found that a relative shorter duration is required to perceive than to produce pitch contours, with non-tonal listeners needing longer duration to detect a change in the pitch direction. Duration asserts a stronger effect on between- and within-category discrimination patterns among tonal listeners. Fewer studies investigated the effects of stimulus duration and vowel quality in trilingual non-native speakers with and without musical training. Our study examines categorical perception of resynthesized pitch stimuli by 13 trilingual Cantonese musicians and 13 Cantonese non-musicians. We manipulated tones on both low and high vowels ([a] and [i]) to create 7-step, level-to-falling and level-torising pitch continua on both [a] and [i] vowels with 9 different duration values. Cantonese speakers participated in identification and same-different tasks.
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