Identification and discrimination of Mandarin Chinese tones by Mandarin Chinese vs. French listeners

Previous work has not yielded clear conclusions about the categorical nature of perception of tone contrasts by native listeners of tone languages. We reopen this issue in a cross-linguistic study comparing Taiwan Mandarin and French listeners. We tested these listeners on three tone continua derived from natural Mandarin utterances within carrier sentences, created via a state-of-the-art pitch-scaling technique in which within-continuum interpolation was applied to both f(0) and intensity contours. Classic assessments of categorization and discrimination of each tone continuum were conducted with both groups of listeners. In Experiment 1. Taiwanese listeners identified the tone of target syllables within carrier sentence context and discriminated tones of single syllables. In Experiment 2, both French and Taiwanese listeners completed an AXB identification task on single syllables. Finally, French listeners were run on an AXB discrimination task in Experiment 3. Results indicated that Taiwanese listeners' perception of tones is quasi-categorical whereas French listeners' is psych ophysically based. French listeners nevertheless show substantial sensitivity to tone contour differences, though to a lesser extent than Taiwanese listeners. Thus, the findings suggest that despite the lack of lexical tone contrasts in the French language, French listeners are not absolutely deaf to tonal variations. They simply fail to perceive tones along the lines of a well-defined and finite set of linguistic categories. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.