The Influence Of Language Experience And Stimulus Complexity On The Categorical Perception Of Mandarin Tones

In recent decades,CP(categorical perception)is one of the most widely studied speech perception phenomena.Early researchers mainly applied the theory of category perception to the study of consonants or vowels.Later,some researchers shifted their study to suprasegmental level,such as lexical tones.Mandarin is a representative tone language,so lots of related research appeared.Most of the concentration were poured to the impact of language experience(tonal vs non-tonal).On the other hand,most of CP of Mandarin tones relied on the speech mode.But,whether CP is limited to a special speech mode is still a contentious question.Only a few researchers did some related studies(e.g.Peng et al.,2010;Xu et al.,2006),which were mostly aimed at Mandarin Chinese,Cantonese,English and German.Aiming to supplement the relevant research in this field,this thesis mainly reports the effects of L1 experience on the CP of Mandarin tones by choosing Japanese native speakers as participants.And it also wants to identify whether categorical perception is speech-specific or domain-general by comparing speech to non-speech stimuli for the two groups.The current study addresses the following three questions:1.What are the differences in the categorical perception of Mandarin tones by Mandarin and Japanese speakers?2.How does language experience affect tone perception patterns and the perception of acoustic cues?3.Is categorical perception speech-specific(speech stimuli)or domain-general(speech and non-speech stimuli)?20 participants are recruited for this study,10 university students speaking native Mandarin Chinese and 10 preliminary learners of Mandarin speaking native Japanese.The study only includes perception experiments,consisting of identification and discrimination tasks.They were synthesized by Praat 5.3 and presented and carried out by E-Prime 2.0.Finally,all the data were analyzed by Excel 2010 and SPSS 21.0.This study finds out that:1)Mandarin listeners perceived rising and falling continua in a categorical manner.While,as for preliminary level Japanese learners of Chinese,their categorization perception ability has improved significantly.2)Chinese,a typical tonal language,has a higher ability of “absolute pitch” and perception of pitch information compared to non-tonal languages.Japanese is a pitch-accent language.Therefore,preliminary level Japanese learners of Chinese may improve their ability to perceive the pitch difference between continua within the tone categories.3)CP is domain-general,not speech-specific.Through the study,it finds out that the categorical perception ability of Mandarin tones for preliminary level Japanese learners of Chinese has developed and the perception results of T2(rising)and T4(falling)categories are relatively good.The findings in this study are in support of the So and Best’ PAM-S model(2010,2014).