Production of Mandarin tone contrasts by musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

Previous research has shown that native speakers of American English who are musicians perform better than non-musicians when identifying and producing the four phonemic tones of Mandarin. The present study corroborates these findings and analyzes acoustic properties of non-natives’ tonal imitations. Listeners imitated Mandarin two-syllable word phrases that varied the vowel (/li/, /la/, /lu/) and tone (high-level, mid-rising, low-dipping, high-falling) of the first syllable. Four native Mandarin speakers rated the musicians, on average, to be better in their imitation of Mandarin tone 4 (high-falling) than non-musicians. There were no significant differences between groups in how they were rated on the other three tones. Acoustical analyses revealed that non-natives failed to match native speakers both in differences in initial F0 and in F0 contour (change from initial to final F0) across tones. Imitations by musicians did not show significant acoustic differences from non-musicians, except for tone 4, where musicians’ imitations showed a significant decrease in F0 from initial to final portions of the syllable; the decrease in F0 for non-musicians was smaller and not significant. Creaky voice (often present in natives’ tone 3 and 4) was observed in many non-native imitations, but was not restricted to tones 3 and 4.