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Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese

This study explores the difficulties in distinguishing different lexical tone contrasts at both sub-lexical and lexical levels for beginning and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin, using a sequence-recall task and an auditory lexical decision task. In both tasks, the Tone 2-Tone 3 contrast is most...

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Autores principales: Zou, Ting, Caspers, Johanneke, Chen, Yiya
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9207513/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35734459
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.891756
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author Zou, Ting
Caspers, Johanneke
Chen, Yiya
author_facet Zou, Ting
Caspers, Johanneke
Chen, Yiya
author_sort Zou, Ting
collection PubMed
description This study explores the difficulties in distinguishing different lexical tone contrasts at both sub-lexical and lexical levels for beginning and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin, using a sequence-recall task and an auditory lexical decision task. In both tasks, the Tone 2-Tone 3 contrast is most prone to errors for both groups of learners. A significant improvement in the advanced group was found for this tone contrast in the sub-lexical sequence recall task, but not in the lexical decision task. This is taken as evidence that utilizing tones in on-line spoken word recognition is more complex and demanding for L2 learners than in a memory-based task. The results of the lexical decision task also revealed that advanced learners have developed a stronger sensitivity to Tone 1 compared to the other three tones, with Tone 4 showing the least sensitivity. These findings suggest different levels of robustness and distinctiveness for the representation of different lexical tones in L2 learners’ lexicon and consequently different levels of proficiency in integrating tones for lexical processing. The observed patterns of difficulty are potentially related to the acoustic characteristics of different lexical tone contrasts as well as to the interference of the suprasegmental features of learner’s native language (i.e., the tonal contrasts of Dutch intonation) on the acquisition of the Mandarin lexical tone contrasts.
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spelling pubmed-92075132022-06-21 Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese Zou, Ting Caspers, Johanneke Chen, Yiya Front Psychol Psychology This study explores the difficulties in distinguishing different lexical tone contrasts at both sub-lexical and lexical levels for beginning and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin, using a sequence-recall task and an auditory lexical decision task. In both tasks, the Tone 2-Tone 3 contrast is most prone to errors for both groups of learners. A significant improvement in the advanced group was found for this tone contrast in the sub-lexical sequence recall task, but not in the lexical decision task. This is taken as evidence that utilizing tones in on-line spoken word recognition is more complex and demanding for L2 learners than in a memory-based task. The results of the lexical decision task also revealed that advanced learners have developed a stronger sensitivity to Tone 1 compared to the other three tones, with Tone 4 showing the least sensitivity. These findings suggest different levels of robustness and distinctiveness for the representation of different lexical tones in L2 learners’ lexicon and consequently different levels of proficiency in integrating tones for lexical processing. The observed patterns of difficulty are potentially related to the acoustic characteristics of different lexical tone contrasts as well as to the interference of the suprasegmental features of learner’s native language (i.e., the tonal contrasts of Dutch intonation) on the acquisition of the Mandarin lexical tone contrasts. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-06-06 /pmc/articles/PMC9207513/ /pubmed/35734459 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.891756 Text en Copyright © 2022 Zou, Caspers and Chen. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Zou, Ting
Caspers, Johanneke
Chen, Yiya
Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese
title Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese
title_full Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese
title_fullStr Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese
title_full_unstemmed Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese
title_short Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese
title_sort perception of different tone contrasts at sub-lexical and lexical levels by dutch learners of mandarin chinese
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9207513/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35734459
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.891756
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