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Perception and Representation of Lexical Tones in Native Mandarin-Learning Infants and Toddlers

Overview of attention for article published in Frontiers in Psychology, July 2017
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Title
Perception and Representation of Lexical Tones in Native Mandarin-Learning Infants and Toddlers
Published in
Frontiers in Psychology, July 2017
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01117
Pubmed ID
Authors

Rushen Shi, Jun Gao, André Achim, Aijun Li

Abstract

We investigated the perceptual development of lexical tones in native tone-learning infants during the first 2 years of life, focusing on two important stages of phonological acquisition: the preverbal and vocabulary explosion stages. Experiment 1 examined monolingual Mandarin-Chinese-learning 4- to 13-month-olds' discrimination of similar lexical tones in Mandarin, Tone 2 (T2, rising) vs. Tone 3 (T3, low-dipping). Infants were habituated to exemplars of one tone (either T2 or T3), and tested with new exemplars of the habituated tone vs. the contrasting tone. Results show that looking time increased for the contrasting tone, but not for new exemplars of the habituated tone, suggesting that infants discriminated the two tones as separate categories. Furthermore, infants' discrimination of the tones was comparable across ages. Experiment 2 tested whether tones are distinguished in toddlers' lexicon. Monolingual Mandarin-learning 19- to 26-month-olds were presented with pairs of objects while one was named. Targets were familiar words bearing T2 or T3, either correctly pronounced (CP) or mispronounced (MP) in tone. We found that word recognition was equally successful in CP and in MP trials when T2 was mispronounced as T3 and T3 as T2, indicating that T2 and T3 are confusable. In contrast, recognition failed when T2 and T3 words were mispronounced as Tone 4 (T4, falling), showing that T4 was represented as a distinct category. Results show that toddlers have difficulty encoding similar tones distinctly in known words. The T2-T3 contrast is particularly challenging because of Tone 3 Sandhi, which changes T3 to T2 when it precedes another T3. At the stage when toddlers track the meaning of T2 and T3 words and track the sandhi alternations, they seem to overgeneralize the two tones as variants of one functional category, reflecting perceptual organization at the level of phonemic learning.

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Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 31 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 31 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Researcher 6 19%
Student > Ph. D. Student 5 16%
Student > Doctoral Student 3 10%
Student > Bachelor 3 10%
Professor 1 3%
Other 5 16%
Unknown 8 26%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Linguistics 13 42%
Psychology 5 16%
Computer Science 1 3%
Social Sciences 1 3%
Medicine and Dentistry 1 3%
Other 1 3%
Unknown 9 29%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 21 July 2017.
All research outputs
#20,436,330
of 22,990,068 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Psychology
#24,361
of 30,195 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#274,431
of 314,579 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#507
of 567 outputs
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