The current study examined the phonolexical processing of Mandarin segments and tones by English speakers at different Mandarin proficiency levels. Eleven English speakers naive to Mandarin, 15 intermediate and 9 advanced second language (L2) learners participated in a word-learning experiment. After learning the sound and meaning of 16 Mandarin…

This study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers' Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n = 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n = 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n = 40) took…

Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic-phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic-phonetic…

L2 sounds present different kinds of challenges to learners at the phonetic, phonological, and lexical levels, but previous studies on L2 tone learning mostly focused on the phonetic and lexical levels. The present study employs an innovative technique to examine the role of prior tonal experience and musical training on forming novel abstract…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether the degree of dominance of Mandarin-English bilinguals' languages affects phonetic processing of tone content in their native language, Mandarin. Method: We tested 72 Mandarin-English bilingual college students with a range of language-dominance profiles in the 2 languages and ages of…

All languages employ certain phonetic contrasts when distinguishing words. Infant speech perception is rapidly attuned to these contrasts before many words are learned, thus phonetic attunement is thought to proceed independently of lexical and referential knowledge. Here, evidence to the contrary is provided. Ninety-eight 9-month-old…

This study examined the perception of the four Mandarin lexical tones by Mandarin-naive Hong Kong Cantonese, Japanese, and Canadian English listener groups. Their performance on an identification task, following a brief familiarization task, was analyzed in terms of tonal sensitivities (A-prime scores on correct identifications) and tonal errors…

The see-saw pair is a technique for perceptually contrasting the two realizations of the third tone, viz. the low-level half third and the low dip full third. (DD)