Doctoral dissertation research: The representation, organization and access of lexical tone by native and nonnative Mandarin speakers

中国及其超过10亿普通话使用者在全球事务中发挥着越来越重要的作用。今天，越来越多的美国人，各个年龄段的人都在通过学习普通话来接触中国。然而，学习普通话带来了许多独特的挑战;也许最令人生畏的是使用词汇音调或音高来区分词义。普通话中的每个音节最多可以有四种不同的音高模式--说话者音高的急剧下降可能是说“四”和“死”的唯一区别。“此外，语调会因说话者的性别、年龄、说话速度以及在话语中的位置和邻近声音而发生很大变化。鉴于语音信号的复杂性，母语为汉语的人如何轻松快速地处理声调，而非母语学习者如何改善这些过程？一个解决方案涉及概率预测语音给定的听众的知识，普通话的分布特性。所有的语言都表现出有规律的语音模式：根据先前的语言经验，某些声音的组合是高度可预测的。本研究团队的前期工作表明，母语为汉语的人对声调与音节的搭配非常敏感，并在单词识别过程中利用这种统计学习。本研究将在此基础上，探讨母语为汉语的人和非母语为汉语的人是如何存储新单词的声调信息的，以及这些信息如何影响单词识别。这项研究将测试三组说话者-母语为汉语的人，以及母语为英语的人，他们要么正在学习汉语作为第二语言，要么以前没有声调语言的经验。参与者将参加为期四天的人工音调语言学习范例。具体来说，研究人员将操纵音节和音调的共同出现，以及参与者听到的说话者的数量，以监测每组对人工语言统计分布的敏感性。参与者的单词识别，发音和对语音刺激的在线眼动反应将在多个会话中进行测量。这项研究计划不仅对我们在单词识别过程中如何学习和使用词汇音调的认知理解有影响，而且对我们如何更好地教授和获得像汉语普通话这样的新音调语言的理解也有影响。

China and its over 1 billion Mandarin speakers play an increasingly important role in global affairs. Today more and more Americans of all ages are engaging with China by learning Mandarin as a foreign language. Yet, learning Mandarin poses many unique challenges; perhaps most daunting is the use of lexical tone, or pitch, to differentiate word meanings. Each syllable in Mandarin can be produced with up to four different pitch patterns--a sharp drop in a speaker's pitch could be the only difference between saying 'four' and 'to die.' Furthermore, tone can vary greatly according to a speaker's gender, age, speaking rate, as well as the position in the utterance and neighboring sounds. Given this complexity in the speech signal, how do native speakers of Mandarin effortlessly and rapidly process tone and how can non-native learners improve these processes? One solution involves probabilistic predictions about speech given the listener's knowledge of Mandarin's distributional properties. All languages exhibit regularly occurring patterns in speech: certain combinations of sounds are highly predictable based on prior experience with the language. Previous work by this research team has shown that native Mandarin speakers are highly sensitive to which tones pattern with which syllables and make use of this statistical learning during word recognition.Building on this research team's previous work, this project will examine how native and non-native Mandarin speakers store mental information about tones for newly learned words and how this information influences word recognition. This research will test 3 groups of speakers-- native Mandarin speakers, and native English speakers who either are learning Mandarin as a second language or have no previous experience with a tonal language. Participants will take part in a four-day artificial tonal language-learning paradigm. Specifically, the investigators will manipulate the co-occurrence of syllables and tones, as well as the number of speakers a participant hears, in order to monitor each group's sensitivity to the statistical distribution of the artificial language. Participants' word identification, pronunciation, and online eye-movement responses to speech stimuli will be measured across multiple sessions. This research program has implications not just for our cognitive understanding of how lexical tone is learned and used during word recognition, but also for our understanding of how to better teach and acquire a new tonal language like Mandarin Chinese.