PERCEPTION OF CANTONESE TONES BY MANDARIN, ENGLISH AND FRENCH SPEAKERS

Abstract

This study tests the influence from L1 experience and psychoacoustic similarity on the naïve perception of Cantonese tones. Three groups of subjects, Mandarin, English and French listeners, participated in an AX discrimination task and a dissimilarity rating task. The discrimination results showed that while the three L1 groups shared some confusable tone pairs which are acoustically similar, they differed in specific pairs under their L1 influence. The rating task found that the different perceptual performances are revealed in terms of weight assigned to different dimensions such as pitch direction and height by the three L1 groups.