The Tone Atlas, step2 : perceptual salience of Thai, Cantonese, Beijing and Singaporean Mandarin tones for tone and non-tone language listeners

This project involves collecting data on the relative perceptual salience of South-East and East Asia lexical tones. From these data a Tone Atlas will be constructed that will assist in the design of experimental studies in first and second language speech perception and language development, the interpretation of cross-language and second language training studies, and the construction of comprehensive theories of tone perception development. Five groups of listeners are tested – four groups of tone language listeners (Thai, Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin and Singaporean Mandarin) and one group of non-tone language listeners (English). Each of these groups is tested for their ability to discriminate pairs of tones in four stimulus sets – Mainland Mandarin (4 tones, 6 tone pairs), Singaporean Mandarin (4 tones, 6 tone pairs), Thai (5 tones, 10 tone pairs), and Cantonese (6 tones, 15 tone pairs), a total of 37 tone pairs. Tones are presented on Consonant-Vowel syllables and two discrimination tasks are given – AX (‘Are the two tones same or different?’) and AXB (‘Is the middle tone more similar to the 1st or 3rd tone?’). Preliminary results for the AX task with Thai participants show that Singaporean Mandarin tone contrasts are the most discriminable and Cantonese the least discriminable. Over languages, contrast pairs involving rising vs falling contours are the most discriminable, and contrast pairs with relatively static contours are the least discriminable. In this paper these results are compared with the results for other tone language listener groups, and with the English language listener group, inexperienced in lexical tone perception. Together the results will contribute to the 4 x 5 (language sets and listener groups) matrix of the relative salience of tone distinctions that will comprise a South- East and East Asian Tone Atlas