Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners
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- Tsan Huang
- University at Buffalo , SUNY Buffalo, Bufallo, N.Y., and b Department of Linguistics , University of California, Berkeley, Calif. , USA
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- Keith Johnson
- University at Buffalo , SUNY Buffalo, Bufallo, N.Y., and b Department of Linguistics , University of California, Berkeley, Calif. , USA
説明
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The results reported in this paper indicate that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese rate the perceptual similarities among the lexical tones of Mandarin differently than do native speakers of American English. Mandarin listeners were sensitive to tone contour while English listeners attended to pitch levels. Chinese listeners also rated tones that are neutralized by phonological tone sandhi rules in Mandarin as more similar to each other than did English speakers – indicating a role of phonology in determining perceptual salience. In two further experiments, we found that some of these differences were eliminated when the listening task focused listeners’ attention on the auditory properties of the stimuli, but, interestingly, a degree of language specificity remained even in the most purely psychophysical listening tasks with speech stimuli.</jats:p>
収録刊行物
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- Phonetica
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Phonetica 67 (4), 243-267, 2011-04-01
Walter de Gruyter GmbH
