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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1392022
This article is part of the Research Topic Tonal Language Processing and Acquisition in Native and Non-native Speakers View all 3 articles

Perception of Mandarin tones across different phonological contexts by native and tone-naive listeners

Provisionally accepted
Jules Vonessen Jules Vonessen *Georgia Zellou Georgia Zellou
  • University of California, Davis, Davis, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Coarticulation is a type of speech variation where sounds take on phonetic properties of adjacent sounds. Listeners generally display perceptual compensation, attributing coarticulatory variation to its source. Mandarin Chinese lexical tones are coarticulated based on surrounding tones. We tested how L1-Mandarin and naive listeners compensate for tonal coarticulation using a paired discrimination task. L1 listeners showed greater perceptual sensitivity to tonal differences than tonenaive listeners. Yet, both L1 and tone-naive listeners showed differences in sensitivity to differentlycoarticulated versions of the rising tone presented in the same tonal context. In different tonal contexts, both groups showed similar patterns of perceptual compensation for tonal coarticulation. Thus, although L1 and naive Mandarin listeners show different sensitivities to tonal variation, they display similar compensatory patterns for tonal coarticulation.

    Keywords: Tonal coarticulation, perceptual compensation, mandarin, Lexical tones, L2 speech perception

    Received: 26 Feb 2024; Accepted: 08 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Vonessen and Zellou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jules Vonessen, University of California, Davis, Davis, United States

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