Cross-language categorization of monosyllabic foreign tones : effects of phonological and phonetic properties of native language

This study examined how native language affected the categorization of foreign tones in terms of the categories of their prosodic systems. Three typolocially different languages (Fox 2000; Yip 2002) - Hong Kong Cantonese (a syllable-timed tone language), Japanese (a mora-timed pitch-accented language), and English (a stress timed language) - were selected as the tested languages, and Mandarin was the target language. Native speakers of the three languages were naïve to Mandarin at the time of the study. Their categorization patterns of the four Mandarin tones were collected for analysis. The results indicated that listeners from the three different language backgrounds were able to categorize Mandarin tones in terms of their prosodic categories, and that both phonological and phonetic properties of native languages affected the perceptual categorizations of Mandarin tones. The findings support the new assumption of PAM for suprasegmentals (So & Best 2008, 2010b) that non-native prosodic categories (e.g., lexical tones) will be assimilated to the categories of listeners' native prosodic system (e.g., tone, pitch accent, and intonation).