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Yang Zhang - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Developmental changes in Categorical Perception of Mandarin Chinese tones
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2019Co-Authors: Dandan Qin, Bing Cheng, Wen Zhang, Yang ZhangAbstract:This study examined developmental changes in Categorical Perception of Mandarin Chinese lexical tones by 22 adults and 16 10-year-olds, who were all native Mandarin Chinese speakers. The speech stimuli included three types of continuum, tone 1 (T1)/tone 2 (T2), tone 1/tone 4 (T4) and tone 2/tone 4. The experimental protocol used conventional identification and discrimination tasks. The results confirmed Categorical Perception of the tonal continua by both adult and child groups. Refined tests further revealed the existence of T1 category with two phonetic boundaries in the T2/T4 continuum. More importantly, age-dependent differences were observed in discrimination accuracy and sensitivity to pitch height. Collectively, the data suggest that although adult-like Categorical Perception of lexical tones can be found by 10 years of age and earlier as the literature suggested, the dynamic developmental trajectory in fine-tuning the Categorical Perception of lexical tones extends beyond the age of 10.
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Effects of language proficiency in Categorical Perception of Mandarin Chinese tones
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2019Co-Authors: Bing Cheng, Wen Zhang, Yang ZhangAbstract:This study compared the Perception of Mandarin Chinese lexical tones by 20 adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers and 17 Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners with different levels of Chinese proficiency. We were particularly interested in confirming the effects of language experience and further assessing how Chinese proficiency might influence the Perception of Mandarin lexical tones. Three types of continuum were used in identification and discrimination tasks, including tone 1 (T1)/tone 2 (T2), tone 1/tone 4 (T4) and tone 2/tone 4. Unlike the native speakers of Chinese who demonstrated clear Categorical Perception for all the continua, the CFL learners showed reduced accuracy in identification and discrimination results. Furthermore, proficiency data correlated with Categorical Perception (CP) of Mandarin lexical tones, suggesting that Categorical Perception of key phonological contrasts in the second language can be considered as a reliable indicator of language proficiency.This study compared the Perception of Mandarin Chinese lexical tones by 20 adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers and 17 Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners with different levels of Chinese proficiency. We were particularly interested in confirming the effects of language experience and further assessing how Chinese proficiency might influence the Perception of Mandarin lexical tones. Three types of continuum were used in identification and discrimination tasks, including tone 1 (T1)/tone 2 (T2), tone 1/tone 4 (T4) and tone 2/tone 4. Unlike the native speakers of Chinese who demonstrated clear Categorical Perception for all the continua, the CFL learners showed reduced accuracy in identification and discrimination results. Furthermore, proficiency data correlated with Categorical Perception (CP) of Mandarin lexical tones, suggesting that Categorical Perception of key phonological contrasts in the second language can be considered as a reliable indicator of language proficiency.
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Musical experience modulates Categorical Perception of lexical tones in native Chinese speakers
Frontiers in psychology, 2015Co-Authors: Linjun Zhang, Yang Zhang, Youyi Liu, Hua ShuAbstract:Although musical training has been shown to facilitate both native and nonnative phonetic Perception, it remains unclear whether and how musical experience affects native speakers’ Categorical Perception (CP) of speech at the suprasegmental level. Using both identification and discrimination tasks, this study compared Chinese-speaking musicians and non-musicians in their Categorical Perception of a lexical tone continuum (from the high level tone, Tone1 to the high falling tone, Tone4). While the identification functions showed similar steepness and boundary location between the two subject groups, the discrimination results revealed superior performance in the musicians for discriminating within-category stimuli pairs but not for between-category stimuli. These findings suggest that musical training can enhance sensitivity to subtle pitch differences between within-category sounds in the presence of robust mental representations in service of Categorical Perception of lexical tonal contrasts.
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Universality of Categorical Perception deficit in developmental dyslexia: an investigation of Mandarin Chinese tones
Journal of child psychology and psychiatry and allied disciplines, 2012Co-Authors: Yajing Zhang, Linjun Zhang, Hua Shu, Yang ZhangAbstract:Background: While previous studies have shown that children affected by dyslexia exhibit a deficit in Categorical Perception of segmental features in alphabetic languages, it remains unclear whether the Categorical Perception deficit generalizes to nonalphabetic languages at the suprasegmental level. In this study, we investigated the occurrence of Categorical Perception deficit in Mandarin lexical tones in Chinese children with dyslexia. Methods: Both behavioral and electrophysiological measures were taken to compare Chinese dyslexic children with age-matched controls. Auditory event-related potentials were collected with a passive listening oddball paradigm. Results: Behavioral data showed that dyslexic children perceived lexical tone contrasts less Categorically and less precisely than age-matched controls. Consistent with the behavioral data, the across-category tone contrast elicited larger mismatch negativity than the within-category distinction in the left hemisphere for the age-matched controls but not for the dyslexic children. Conclusion: The behavioral and electrophysiological results demonstrate impaired Categorical Perception of lexical tones in Chinese children with dyslexia. Our findings support the hypothesis that children affected by dyslexia have a general deficit in Categorical Perception of speech, which generalizes to nonalphabetic languages at the suprasegmental level.
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Categorical Perception of lexical tones in Chinese revealed by mismatch negativity.
Neuroscience, 2010Co-Authors: Linjun Zhang, Hua Shu, Yang ZhangAbstract:The present study investigated the neurophysiological correlates of Categorical Perception of Chinese lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese. Relative to standard stimuli, both within- and across-category deviants elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) in bilateral frontal-central recording sites. The MMN elicited in the right sites was marginally larger than in the left sites, which reflects the role of the right hemisphere in acoustic processing. At the same time, relative to within-category deviants, the across-category deviants elicited larger MMN in the left recording sites, reflecting the long-term phonemic traces of lexical tones. These results provide strong neurophysiological evidence in support of Categorical Perception of lexical tones in Chinese. More important, they demonstrate that acoustic and phonological information is processed in parallel within the MMN time window for the Perception of lexical tones. Finally, homologous nonspeech stimuli elicited similar MMN patterns, indicating that lexical tone knowledge influences the Perception of nonspeech signals.
Yun Nan - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Categorical Perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics
Frontiers in psychology, 2015Co-Authors: Wan Ting Huang, Chang Liu, Qi Dong, Yun NanAbstract:Previous research suggests that within Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics, only a subgroup has behavioral lexical tone Perception impairments (tone agnosia), whereas the rest of amusics do not. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the Categorical nature of lexical tone Perception in Mandarin-speaking amusics with and without behavioral lexical tone deficits. Three groups of listeners (controls, pure amusics and amusics with tone agnosia) participated in tone identification and discrimination tasks. Indexes of the Categorical Perception of a physical continuum of fundamental frequencies ranging from a rising to level tone were measured. Specifically, the stimulus durations were manipulated at 100 and 200 ms. For both stimulus durations, all groups exhibited similar Categorical boundaries. The pure amusics showed sharp identification slopes and significantly peaked discrimination functions similar to those of normal controls. However, such essential characteristics for the Categorical Perception of lexical tones were not observed in amusics with tone agnosia. An enlarged step-size from 20 Hz to 35 Hz was not able to produce any discrimination peaks in tone agnosics either. The current study revealed that only amusics with tone agnosia showed a lack of Categorical tone Perception, while the pure amusics demonstrated typical Categorical Perception of lexical tones, indicating that the deficit of pitch processing in music does not necessarily result in the deficit in the Categorical Perception of lexical tones. The different performance between congenital amusics with and without tone agnosia provides a new perspective on the proposition of the relationship between music and speech Perception.
Yufang Yang - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Impaired Categorical Perception of lexical tones in Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics.
Memory & cognition, 2012Co-Authors: Cunmei Jiang, Jeff P. Hamm, Vanessa K. Lim, Ian J. Kirk, Yufang YangAbstract:The degree to which cognitive resources are shared in the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones remains uncertain. Testing Mandarin amusics on their Categorical Perception of Mandarin lexical tones may provide insight into this issue. In the present study, a group of 15 amusic Mandarin speakers identified and discriminated Mandarin tones presented as continua in separate blocks. The tonal continua employed were from a high-level tone to a mid-rising tone and from a high-level tone to a high-falling tone. The two tonal continua were made in the contexts of natural speech and of nonlinguistic analogues. In contrast to the controls, the participants with amusia showed no improvement for discrimination pairs that crossed the classification boundary for either speech or nonlinguistic analogues, indicating a lack of Categorical Perception. The lack of Categorical Perception of Mandarin tones in the amusic group shows that the pitch deficits in amusics may be domain-general, and this suggests that the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones may share certain cognitive resources and/or processes (Patel 2003, 2008, 2012).
Wan Ting Huang - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Categorical Perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics
Frontiers in psychology, 2015Co-Authors: Wan Ting Huang, Chang Liu, Qi Dong, Yun NanAbstract:Previous research suggests that within Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics, only a subgroup has behavioral lexical tone Perception impairments (tone agnosia), whereas the rest of amusics do not. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the Categorical nature of lexical tone Perception in Mandarin-speaking amusics with and without behavioral lexical tone deficits. Three groups of listeners (controls, pure amusics and amusics with tone agnosia) participated in tone identification and discrimination tasks. Indexes of the Categorical Perception of a physical continuum of fundamental frequencies ranging from a rising to level tone were measured. Specifically, the stimulus durations were manipulated at 100 and 200 ms. For both stimulus durations, all groups exhibited similar Categorical boundaries. The pure amusics showed sharp identification slopes and significantly peaked discrimination functions similar to those of normal controls. However, such essential characteristics for the Categorical Perception of lexical tones were not observed in amusics with tone agnosia. An enlarged step-size from 20 Hz to 35 Hz was not able to produce any discrimination peaks in tone agnosics either. The current study revealed that only amusics with tone agnosia showed a lack of Categorical tone Perception, while the pure amusics demonstrated typical Categorical Perception of lexical tones, indicating that the deficit of pitch processing in music does not necessarily result in the deficit in the Categorical Perception of lexical tones. The different performance between congenital amusics with and without tone agnosia provides a new perspective on the proposition of the relationship between music and speech Perception.
Cunmei Jiang - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Impaired Categorical Perception of lexical tones in Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics.
Memory & cognition, 2012Co-Authors: Cunmei Jiang, Jeff P. Hamm, Vanessa K. Lim, Ian J. Kirk, Yufang YangAbstract:The degree to which cognitive resources are shared in the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones remains uncertain. Testing Mandarin amusics on their Categorical Perception of Mandarin lexical tones may provide insight into this issue. In the present study, a group of 15 amusic Mandarin speakers identified and discriminated Mandarin tones presented as continua in separate blocks. The tonal continua employed were from a high-level tone to a mid-rising tone and from a high-level tone to a high-falling tone. The two tonal continua were made in the contexts of natural speech and of nonlinguistic analogues. In contrast to the controls, the participants with amusia showed no improvement for discrimination pairs that crossed the classification boundary for either speech or nonlinguistic analogues, indicating a lack of Categorical Perception. The lack of Categorical Perception of Mandarin tones in the amusic group shows that the pitch deficits in amusics may be domain-general, and this suggests that the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones may share certain cognitive resources and/or processes (Patel 2003, 2008, 2012).