PERCEPTUAL ASSIMILATION EFFECTS ON L2 TONAL PROCESSING

The goal of this study is to expand our understanding of cross-linguistic comparison in non-native speech perception, focusing on perceptual assimilation at the suprasegmental level. The current study investigates perception of Mandarin tones by Cantonese listeners. In Experiment 1, Mandarin tones were presented and the Cantonese listeners were requested to identify which tone they heard. In Experiment 2, the Cantonese listeners were instructed to rate how similar each Mandarin tone was to a Cantonese tone on a 1 to 5 scale subjectively. The results suggest that tonal confusion errors may result from not only the similar acoustic properties of tone pairs but also perceptual assimilation between L1 and L2 tonal contrasts. Tone 1 and Tone 4 in Mandarin were both rated as the most similar to Tone 1 in Cantonese. Tone 2 and tone 3 in Mandarin were perceived as belonging to the overlapping set of Cantonese tonemes. The findings are discussed in terms of the effects of the L1 prosodic system on L2 perception. Additionally, the discussion explores how perceptually assimilation patterns can predict listeners' perception performance in the domain of lexical tones.