Categorizing Mandarin tones into listeners’ native prosodic categories: The role of phonetic properties

This study examined whether native speakers of non-tone languages (Australian English, and French) were able to perceive foreign Mandarin tones in a sentence environment according to their native prosodic categories. Results found that both English and French speakers were able to perceptually categorize foreign tones into their intonational categories (i-Categories), and that categorizations were based on the contextual phonetic similarities of the pitch contours they perceived between Mandarin tones and their native i-Categories. Results also showed that French speakers, but not English speakers, were able to detect the fine-detailed phonetic feature differences between Tone 3 and Tone 4 (low/falling tone vs. high-falling tone). The findings support a new extension of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM; Best 1995) to suprasegmental phonology (So and Best 2008): that non-native prosodic categories (e.g. lexical tones) will be assimilated to the categories of listeners’ native prosodic system (e.g. intonation). In addition, rhythmic differences among languages may also contribute to perception of non-native tones.