Effects of perceptual training in Mandarin tone sandhi production

Abstract

It is well-established that the production of non-native lexical tone poses a great challenge to adult L2 learners (Hao,2012; Chang and Yao, 2016; Mok et al., 2018). The production of tonal patterns on disyllabic words is more challenging for non-native speakers because additional computational and/or lexical mechanisms are involved in correctly applying the tone sandhi rules in languages like Mandarin (Chen et al., 2017). Previous speech training studies have shown that perceptual training could improve both perception and production of non-native tones in isolation (Wang et al., 1999, 2003; Wayland and Li, 2008). The current study aims to further examine if perceptual training promotes learning of tonal patterns on disyllabic words by examining the production of two Mandarin Tone sandhi rules—the third tone sandhi and half-third tone sandhi by Cantonese learners. Native Cantonese speakers were trained with an identification task and a same/different discrimination task with both real and wug words. Their pre- and post-training production was compared with native speakers’ production, and it showed that perceptual training can lead to more successful learning of Mandarin tone sandhi rules based on acoustic and statistical analyses of tonal contours.