EAPSI: Training tonal awareness in second language Chinese learners

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With the rise of China as a global economic power, Chinese has become a popular second language for students at all levels of education. Despite this growth in popularity, very little time has been spent on refining the pedagogical methods related to Chinese language teaching and even less research has been done to investigate the processes involved with learning Chinese from the second language learner's perspective. One of the key aspects of the Chinese language that western learners often struggle with is the presence of lexical tones: changes in a speaker's voice pitch can change the meaning of a word. This study will investigate methods that can be used to train learners to parse out tonal information in order to facilitate processing in the language learner's mind. This project will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Connie Qun Guan, a well-known expert on second language reading in Chinese at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing, China.This project will take steps toward understanding the second language learner's experience of tone processing by using a training procedure with a pre-test and post-test. The primary objective of this research is to determine whether learners can be trained to separate segmental and tonal information in the process of reading. The pre-test and post-test will quantify this separation using a homophone judgment task that will allow the researcher to determine the learner's sensitivity to both tonal and segmental information. Participants in this study will include native alphabetic language learners of Chinese who will be compared against a group of monolingual native Chinese speakers to determine the precise nature of tonal processing in the second language group. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.