Purpose: This study aimed to explore the effects of Mandarin congenital amusia with or without lexical tone deficit (i.e., tone agnosia and pure amusia) on Mandarin vowel and tone identification in different types of vowels (e.g., monophthong, diphthongs, and triphthongs) embedded in consonant-vowel contexts with and without semantic content.…

Purpose: Although variability of training materials has the potential to benefit the learning of lexical tones, the benefit is contingent on an individual's pitch aptitude. Previous studies did not segregate immediate learning and consolidation after an overnight interval, and little is known about how pitch aptitude differences affect…

Purpose: We aim to identify the possible sources for age-related differences in the perception of emotion in speech, focusing on the distinct roles of semantics (words) and prosody (tone of speech) and their interaction. Method: We implement the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (Ben-David, Multani, Shakuf, Rudzicz, & van Lieshout, 2016).…

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their "yes/no" questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the…

This study investigates the perception and production of a specific type of metaphoric gesture that mimics melody in speech, also called "pitch gesture," in the learning of L2 suprasegmental features. In a between-subjects design, a total of 106 participants with no previous knowledge of Chinese were asked to observe (Experiment 1) and…

The present study investigated first language (L1) and second language (L2) Chinese categorization of tones and segments and use of tones and segments in lexical access. Previous research has shown that English listeners rely more on pitch height than pitch direction when perceiving lexical tones; however, it remains unclear if this superior use…

Music education students ("N" = 21) at a university in the southeastern United States took an error detection test that had been designed for this study to determine the effects of tonal contexts versus atonal contexts on the ability to detect performance errors. The investigator composed 16 melodies, 8 of which were tonal and 8 of which…

Recent literature has sought to understand the presence of epenthetic vowels after the productions of postvocalic word-final consonants by second language (L2) learners whose first languages (L1s) restrict the presence of obstruents in coda position. Previous models include those in which epenthesis is seen as a strategy to mitigate the effects of…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

The model presents neurobiologically plausible accounts of sound recognition (including absolute pitch), neural plasticity involved in pitch, loudness and location information integration, and streaming and auditory recall. It is proposed that a cortical mechanism for sound identification modulates the spectrotemporal response fields of inferior…

This article examines the extent of differences between second language (L2) learners in their abilities to identify L2 consonants and provides evidence for linguistic generalization from one consonant to other consonants. It distinguishes among different sorts of models of the relationship between segments: (a) "segmentally specific models" in…

This study investigated identification of fragmented Mandarin tones by non-native listeners. Monosyllabic Mandarin words were digitally processed to generate intact, silent-center, center-only, and onset-only syllables. The syllables were recorded with two carrier phrases such that the offset of the carrier tone and the onset of the target tone…

Over the past few decades perspectives on second language (L2) pronunciation have evolved from pessimistic appraisals of the capabilities of L2 learners and doubts about the value of instruction to a view of pronunciation teaching as an effective and important part of language pedagogy. Earlier research on the teaching of pronunciation dwelt…

This study examined the perception of the four Mandarin lexical tones by Mandarin-naive Hong Kong Cantonese, Japanese, and Canadian English listener groups. Their performance on an identification task, following a brief familiarization task, was analyzed in terms of tonal sensitivities (A-prime scores on correct identifications) and tonal errors…

This paper reports the results of an experimental phonetic study examining pitch peak alignment in production and perception of three-syllable one-word sentences with phonetic rising-falling pitch movement by speakers of Russian. The first part of the study (Experiment 1) utilizes 22 one-word three-syllable utterances read by five female speakers…