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Language-specificity in auditory perception of Chinese tones

Huang, Tsan
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1092856661

Abstract Details

2004, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Linguistics.
This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of language-specificity in the auditory perception of Chinese tones. Chinese and American English (AE) listeners participated in a series of perception experiments, which involved short ISIs (300ms in Experiment 1 and 100ms elsewhere) and an AX discrimination (limited set in Experiments 2 and 3, speeded response in Experiments BJ, RG and YT) or AX degree-of-difference rating (Experiment 4) task. All experiments used natural speech monosyllabic tone stimuli, except Experiment 2, which used sinewave simulations of Putonghua (Beijing Mandarin) tones. AE listeners showed psychoacoustic listening in all experiments, paying much attention to onset and offset pitch. Chinese listeners showed language-specific patterns in all experiments to various degrees. The most robust language-specific effects of Putonghua were found in Experiments 1, 3 and 4, where the T214 (as well as T35) neutralization rule shortened the perceptual distance between T35 and T214 (or that between T55 and T35) for Chinese listeners. Cross-dialectal as well as age differences were observed among Chinese listeners in Experiments BJ, RG and YT using natural speech stimuli from Putonghua, Rugao (a Jianghuai Mandarin dialect, Jiangsu Province) and Yantai (a Northern Mandarin dialect, Shandong Province), respectively. Listeners generally showed native advantage in perceiving tones in their own dialects. Cross-dialectal tone category correspondences (R44 to T51 and Y55 to T51) caused more confusion for older Rugao and Yantai listeners between the relevant tones. Furthermore, Yantai older listeners, with more sandhi rules in their dialect, showed different perceptual patterns from other listeners, including Yantai young listeners. Since these experiments employed procedures hypothesized to tap the auditory trace mode (e.g. Pisoni, 1973; Macmillan, 1987), language-specificity found in this dissertation seems to support the proposal of an auditory cortical map (Guenther et al. 1999). But the data also suggest that the model need to be refined to account for different degrees of language-specificity, which are better handled by the lexical distance model advanced by Johnson (2004), although the latter model may be a bit too rigid on how much lexical interference is allowed in low-level auditory perception.
Keith Johnson (Advisor)
214 p.
Language, Linguistics
tone perception; language-specificity; speech perception models

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Huang, T. (2004). Language-specificity in auditory perception of Chinese tones [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1092856661

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Huang, Tsan. Language-specificity in auditory perception of Chinese tones. 2004. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1092856661.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Huang, Tsan. "Language-specificity in auditory perception of Chinese tones." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1092856661

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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