Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of Mandarin tone productions before and after perceptual training
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Issue Date
2003-02-01Author
Wang, Yue
Jongman, Allard
Sereno, Joan A.
Publisher
The Acoustical Society of America
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Training American listeners to perceive Mandarin tones has been shown to be effective, with trainees’ identification improving by 21%. Improvement also generalized to new stimuli and new talkers, and was retained when tested six months after training [Y. Wang et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 3649–3658 (1999)]. The present study investigates whether the tonecontrasts gained perceptually transferred to production. Before their perception pretest and after their post-test, the trainees were recorded producing a list of Mandarin words. Their productions were first judged by native Mandarin listeners in an identification task. Identification of trainees’ post-test tone productions improved by 18% relative to their pretest productions, indicating significant tone production improvement after perceptual training. Acoustic analyses of the pre- and post-training productions further reveal the nature of the improvement, showing that post-training tone contours approximate native norms to a greater degree than pretraining tone contours. Furthermore, pitch height and pitch contour are not mastered in parallel, with the former being more resistant to improvement than the latter. These results are discussed in terms of the relationship between non-native tone perception and production as well as learning at the suprasegmental level.
Description
This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/113/2/10.1121/1.1531176.
ISSN
0001-4966Collections
Citation
Wang, Yue and Jongman, Allard and Sereno, Joan A. 2003. “Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of Mandarin tone productions before and after perceptual training.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113, 1033-1043). http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1531176
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