Identification and discrimination of tonal pitch in speech and nonspeech stimuli for Chinese- and English-native speakers.
Chang Liu · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
Given that Chinese is a tonal language while English is not, the present study is to examine how language background affects tonal identification and discrimination in speech and nonspeech signals for Mandarin-Chinese and American-English native speakers. The fundamental frequency (f0) contour was systematically manipulated from tone 2 (rising), to tone 1 (level), and to tone 4 (falling) for three types of signals: Chinese vowels /ɑ/, English vowels /æ/, and tonal sweeps. Both groups of listeners showed categorical perception in the identification of tones 1, 2, and 4, while Chinese-native speakers showed sharper boundaries across tonal categories than English-native speakers. Just-noticeable difference (JND) in tonal pitch was also measured for the standard tone 1, tone 2, and tone 4 of the three types of signals. JND was significantly smaller in speech stimuli for Chinese-native speakers than for English-native speakers, but quite comparable between the two groups of listeners for nonspeech stimuli. There results indicate that tonal pitch may be perceived specifically in speech stimuli, and for nonspeech stimuli, the capacity to process the tonal sweeps is similar across listeners with different language backgrounds.