Results Tone study: Accuracy and error rates (percentage lower than 10% is omitted) Consonant study:...
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Transcript of Results Tone study: Accuracy and error rates (percentage lower than 10% is omitted) Consonant study:...
ResultsTone study: Accuracy and error rates (percentage lower than 10% is omitted)
Consonant study: Accuracy and error rates
3aSCb5. The categorical nature of tones and consonants: Evidence from second language perception and production
Yen-Chen Hao & Kenneth de Jong([email protected] & [email protected])
Department of Linguistics, Indiana University
Main Points• For second language learners, tone
acquisition and consonant acquisition may impose difficulty on different types of language processing mechanisms.
• For tone acquisition, a major problem comes from associating pitch patterns with linguistic categories.
• For consonant acquisition, the difficulty may result from perception, production, or both.
Introduction • Comparing tones and consonants
Tones are commonly considered to be psychologically equivalent to segments (Ladd, 1996: 1-2). But is it true?
• L2 acquisition of tones and consonants
• Current L2 speech models like Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1987) and Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best et al 1988) apply to segments.
• Previous studies on tone acquisition assessed either perception (Kiriloff 1969, Broselow et al. 1987) or production (Shen 1989, Miracle 1989), but not both. No studies used Mimicry task as a assessment.
• L2 learners’ performance in different tasks may differ, suggesting that each task requires different language processing mechanisms.
• Language processing mechanisms
• Audition: processing auditory input• Articulation: motor control for output• Linguistic categorization: association with conventional
categories
• Different tasks involve different language processing mechanisms
Question: If learners’ performance on different tasks reflects competence in different language processing mechanisms, are tone acquisition and consonant acquisition similar in terms of learners’ competence?
Methods• Comparing two SLA studies:
Tone study (English → Chinese)• Participants 10 English-speaking L2 learners of
Mandarin Chinese• Stimuli 4 Mandarin tones 1 /55/, 2 /35/, 3
/214/, 4 /51/ on 4 syllables /waŋ/, /ji/, /jo/, /ma/
• Tasks 1. Identification: Subjects identified the tones of
monosyllabic and disyllabic nonsense words using L2 tonal labels.
2. Reading: Subjects read aloud a list of
monosyllabic and disyllabic nonsense words spelt in Pinyin plus tonal labels. Their responses were recorded.
3. Mimicry: Subjects repeated monosyllabic and
disyllabic nonsense words immediately after hearing them. Their responses were recorded.
• Evaluation 2 Chinese native speakers judged
independently the tone of each syllable produced in Reading and Mimicry tasks.
Consonant study (Korean → English)
• Participants 4 Korean learners of English• Target 8 English obstruents /p, b, t, d, f,
v, θ, ð/ in different positions• Tasks 1. Identification: Subjects identified the obstruents in
nonsense words consisting of the vowel /a/ and one of the 8 obstruents in onset, intervocalic, or coda positions.
2. Reading: Similar as Tone study. 3. Mimicry: Similar as Tone study.• Evaluation 10 English native speakers judged the
consonant produced by Korean subjects in Reading and Mimicry tasks.
Acknowledgements
Work supported by the NSF (grant #BCS-04406540). We also express appreciation to Mi-Hee Cho for help in collecting the consonant data and to Kyoko Nagao and Noah Silbert for their work on the design and processing of the data.
Discussion• t-test comparing the accuracy rates between pairs of tasks
• Tone learning For tones, L2 learners are exceptionally accurate in tone mimicry task, relative to tasks which require labeling
• Difficulty lies in the association of pitch patterns with the corresponding linguistic categories, even though learners have had extensive instruction in tone labels
• Reading errors tend to be specific to certain tone combinations, while ID errors tend to be more widespread
• Consonant learning• For consonants, L2 learners’ Mimicry
performance combines errors found in ID and Reading
• Difficulties apparently lie more in auditory perceptual and production system
• Reading errors tend to follow patterns predicted by transfer of native categories, while ID errors tend to be more idiosyncratic
• Why are different mechanisms problems for tones and consonants?
• Consonants served as the original example of categorical perception (Liberman et al, 1957)
• Stagray and Downs (1993) found that Chinese speakers made more categorical judgment to frequency changes, while English speakers made more gradient discrimination.
• In Xu et al. (2006), Chinese speakers showed categorical perception of a continuum of F0 contours, while English speakers did not.
Nature of tones may be less categorical, unless trained by linguistic experience.
Conclusion1.When acquiring tones, the problems
mostly reside in linguistic categorization. While for consonant acquisition, the difficulty results from auditory perception, articulation or both, but not so obviously from linguistic categorization.
2.Tones may be inherently less categorical than consonants.
3.It is necessary to consider a variety of tasks in assessing linguistic competence.
ReferencesBest, C. T., McRoberts, G. W., & Sithole, N. M. (1988). Examination of Perceptual Reorganization for Nonnative Speech Contrasts: Zulu Click Discrimination by English-Speaking Adults and Infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14(3), 345-360.Broselow, E., Hurtig, R. R., and Ringen, C. (1987). The perception of second language prosody. In G.
Ioup and S.H. Weinberger (eds.), Inter-language Phonology: The Acquisition of Second Language
Sound System. Cambridge: Newbury House Publishers: 350-61. Flege, J. (1987) The production of “new” and “similar” phones in a foreign language: evidence for the effect of equivalence classification. Journal of Phonetics 15, 47-65.Kiriloff, C. (1969). On the auditory perception of tones in Mandarin. Phonetica 20: 2-4.Ladd, D. R. (1996). Intonational Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Liberman, A.; Harris, K.; Hoffman, H.; & Griffith, B. (1957). The discrimination of speech sounds within
and across phonemic boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54: 358-368.Miracle, W. C. (1989). Tone production of American students of Chinese: A preliminary acoustic study.
Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association 24: 49-65.Shen, S. X. N. (1989). Toward a register approach in teaching Mandarin tones. Journal of Chinese
Language Teachers Association 24: 27-47.Stagray, J. R. and Downs, D. (1993). Differential sensitivity for frequency among speakers of a tone and a
nontone language. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 21: 143-63.Xu, Y., Gandour, J., Francis, L. (2006). Effects of language experience and stimulus complexity on the
categorical perception of pitch direction. Journal of Acoustic Society of America 120: 1063 – 74.
The 154th Meeting of Acoustic Society of America in New Orleans, Louisiana, November 29, 2007
L1 L2 Target
1 English Mandarin Chinese Tones
2 Korean English Obstruents
Tone 1 Tone 2 Tone 3 Tone 4
Study
Pair
Tone Consonant
ID – Mimicry -5.103 ** 1.979 *
Reading – Mimicry -4.534 ** 2.938 **
ID – Reading -0.86 0.162