Mandarin Tone Perception in Cantonese Children

Abstract

Lexical tone in Mandarin posed great difficulty to second language learners. For non-tone language speakers, like English, the difficulty in Mandarin lexical tone learning may be due to the absence of tone contrasts in English sound system. For tone language speakers, like Cantonese, it is still not clear if speakers’ native linguistic experience of tones has facilitative or interfering effect. It appears that the learning mechanisms of these two groups of learners are different. The present study will examine learners’ linguistic difference and contrastive processing mechanism in lexical tone learning in children. The perception of Mandarin lexical tones by two typical groups of children with Cantonese and English L1 background will be compared. These two groups of children will be matched with reference to their age, gender and Mandarin exposure. Children at Primary 2 (about age 7) will be selected as the target group since by this age, children would finish Pinyin learning including lexical tones. Five syllables bu, di, lu, na, ka with four tones will be used as the stimuli due to the syllable existence in Cantonese and English so that participants could concentrate more on tones. The perception test consists of an AXB discrimination task and an identification task. If there is interfering effect for tone language speakers on tone learning of another tone language, Cantonese students will show poorer performance compared to English students. Error patterns will also be examined to reveal any specific processing mechanisms demonstrated by these two groups of participants.