Archived Projects
Factors Influencing Cantonese Lexical Tone and Tone Word Acquisition
Research Team: Angela Cooper and Yue Wang
This research examines how linguistic and musical experience influence non-native Cantonese tone perception and word learning. Native Thai and English listeners, subdivided into musician and non-musician groups, engaged in a perceptual training program. They learned words distinguished by five Cantonese tones during training, also completing a musical aptitude task and pre and post-training lexical tone identification tasks. This study looks to investigate how these two factors interact, and what impact the combination will have on the acquisition of non-native tone words, as well as which factor facilitates the acquisition of new lexical items to a greater degree.
Additionally, we will also compare a group of native English non-musicians undergoing lexical tone training before completing the word learning program to the English musicians and non-musicians who received no tone training. This will enable us to examine how raising listeners鈥� tonal awareness transfers to the acquisition of tone words.
Perceived Nativeness of Temporal Adjustments in Speech
Research Team:Yue Wang, Dawn Behne (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway) and Qi Dong (Beijing Normal University, China)
Native Mandarin Chinese speakers鈥� productions of English consonant-vowel (CV) syllables have shown syllable-internal temporal adjustments in the direction of native (English)-like CVs (Wang & Behne 2004). This research investigates whether these temporal adjustments affect perceived nativeness.