Asymmetries in lexical tone perception

Abstract

Infants and adults found a change from a less peripheral vowel to a more peripheral vowel to be easier to detect than the reverse direction. However, the perceptual processes underlying vowel directional asymmetries remain to be fully understood. This study explored asymmetries in lexical tone perception by native Mandarin and native English speakers. Fewer asymmetries were found among Mandarin speakers than among English speakers due likely to a lack of phonological categories of lexical tones in English. However, some asymmetric patterns were common between the two groups. Both groups found a change from Mandarin tone 1 to other tones more challenging than the reverse direction, but the opposite was true for Mandarin tone 4. Relative greater degrees of difficulty on speaker normalization for a level tone in comparison to a contour tone may have been responsible for this result.