Abstract
In tonal languages, as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, word meaning is
partially determined by lexical tones. Previous studies suggest that
lexical tones are processed by native listeners as linguistic information
and not as pure tonal information. This study aims at verifying if,
in nontonal languages speakers, the discrimination of lexical Mandarin
tones varies in function of the melodic ability. Forty-six students
with no previous experience of Mandarin or any other tonal language
were presented with two short lists of spoken monosyllabic Mandarin
words and invited to perform a same-different task trying to identify
whether the variation were phonological or tonal. Main results show
that subjects perform significantly better in identifying phonological
variations rather than tonal ones and interestingly, the group with
a high melodic ability (assessed by Wing subtest 3) shows a better
performance exclusively in detecting tonal variations.
- (psychology),discrimination
- (psychology),recognition
- (psychology),transfer
- (psychology):
- adult,analysis
- learning,verbal
- learning:
- measurement,transfer
- of
- perception,psycholinguistics,reaction
- physiology,female,humans,italian,language,male,mandarin,music,phonetics,pitch
- physiology,language,memory,music,musicality,perception,speech,tone
- physiology,speech
- physiology,verbal
- production
- time,recognition
- variance,discrimination
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