Abstract
Two groups of non-native adult learners of Mandarin in Australia were directly compared in their ability to perceive monosyllabic Mandarin words contrasting in lexical tones. They differed in their linguistic experience (non-heritage (n=10), heritage (n=12)). A group of eight native Mandarin speakers and a group of ten functionally monolingual speakers of Australian English were included as controls. All non-native learners used English as their primary language of communication. However, the heritage learners were able to communicate in Cantonese as well as English. The primary question of interest was whether heritage learners’ knowledge of contrastive tone in Cantonese might give them an advantage over English-speaking learners in perceiving tone contrasts in Mandarin. In general, there were more similarities than differences between the two groups of learners in their response patterns. Of the six tone contrasts examined (T1-T2, T1-T3, T1-T4, T2-T3, T2-T4, T3-T4), the two groups significantly differed only on T1-T4. The heritage learners were less accurate on T1-T4 than the non-heritage learners who are monolingual speakers of Australian English. On the other hand, the non-heritage learners were more accurate than Australian English speakers with no prior experience with Mandarin on all tone contrasts. Thus, we conclude that simply having an exposure to and functional knowledge of another tonal language since early childhood does not guarantee accurate perception of Mandarin tones in comparison with adult learners without prior experience with tonal languages.
About the authors
Kimiko Tsukada teaches Japanese language in the Department of International Studies at Macquarie University. Her research interests include experimental phonetics, cross-language speech production/perception, second language speech learning. Kimiko has been conducting phonetic research with people from various language backgrounds such as Arabic, Cantonese, English, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Mandarin, Norwegian, Persian, Thai and Vietnamese. Email: kimiko.tsukada@mq.edu.au
Hui Ling Xu is a senior lecturer of Chinese Studies at Macquarie University. She has extensive teaching and research experience in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language. Her other research interests include Chinese linguistics, applied linguistics, intercultural communication in language teaching and learning and the application of technology in foreign language education. Email: huiling.xu@mq.edu.au
Nan Xu Rattanasone is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and an associate investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her contributions to research include discovering tone modifications in speech directed to tone language infants as a mechanism for bootstrapping language and the interaction between phonology and morphology on acquiring a second language. Email: nan.xu@mq.edu.au
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge a helpful suggestion made by an anonymous reviewer for future experiment, that is, the use of disyllabic combinations with the four tones preceding a neutral tone (e.g. bàba, háizi, yǐzi). This study is funded by internal research grants at Macquarie University. Portions of this study were presented at the 14th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST2012) at Macquarie University (MQ), Australia in December 2012, the International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB9) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in June 2013 and the Workshop on The Role of Prosody in Language Learning: Stress, Tone and Intonation at MQ in December 2014. We gratefully acknowledge valuable input from the audience at these conferences. We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and Angeline Guo and Ng Bee Chin for their assistance with the participant recruitment.
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