SPECIFICITY OF REPRESENTATION OF TONES: EFFECTS OF NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE TONES ON SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION

Abstract

The present study explored 2.5-3.5-year-old (toddlers) and 4-5-year-old (preschoolers) Mandarin-English bilinguals’ sensitivity to native and non-native tones. The Preferential Looking Paradigm was employed. Participants were exposed to correct pronunciations, mandarin mispronunciations (early- and late- acquired tones), and cantonese mispronunciations (Transposed and Contour tones). Findings showed that both toddlers and preschoolers fixated upon targets when words were correctly pronounced. Toddlers rejected both early and late-acquired Mandarin tone mispronunciations as acceptable labels for familiar words. Preschoolers rejected Mandarin tone mispronunciations of early-acquired tones as acceptable labels but continued to treat Mandarin tone mispronunciations of late-acquired tones as labels of referent objects. Therefore, while toddlers demonstrated sensitivity to both early- and late-acquired tones, preschoolers were only sensitive to early-acquired tones and not late-acquired tones. With respect to Cantonese tone mispronunciations, both toddlers and preschoolers did not demonstrate sensitivity to transposed tone substitutions. For Cantonese contour tone substitutions, toddlers were insensitive to contour tones substitutions. However, preschoolers rejected contour tones substitutions as acceptable labels, demonstrating sensitivity. The findings thus revealed that both native and nonnative tones constrain children’s ability in reccognizing familiar words.