An Experimental Study of Perceiving Mandarin Tones for English Speakers Without Chinese Learning Experience
Yanjing Chen · Journal of Hechi University · 2012
Using an AX discrimination task,this paper tests the perception of Mandarin tone pairs by native English speakers on accuracy rate and response time.Among the ten tone pairs tested,Tone2-Tone3,Tone1-Tone4 and Tone2-Tone4 pairs are the hardest,and Tone1-Tone1,Tone3-Tone3 and Tone1-Tone3 the easiest,while the rest of the tone pairs fall in between.Besides,female subjects perform significantly better than male subjects,while such segmental factors as onset,nucleus and coda had no influence on the perception of Mandarin tones.