Categorical Perception Of Mandarin Tones By First Language Students And Second Language Students

The present study is a cross-linguistic investigation on categorical perception of Mandarin tones by first language students (Mandarin speakers) and second language students (Uygur speakers). The perception experiments include two parts: identification experiment and discrimination experiment. Based on these experiments, our questions are: 1) Whether or not the tone perception by Han students is categorical and 2) Whether or not the tone perception by Uygur students is categorical. 3) Whether the Uygur students show less sensitivity to absolute frequency differency than Han students.In the identification experiment, the computer runs the software of Visplay. Every listener is assigned an answer sheet and required to choose answers on the sheet after hearing the stimuli. The chosen item on the paper are four Chinese characters, i.e."妈,麻,马,骂". When these answer sheets are collected, the response are saved into the computer as the data. All the data are analyzed by the software of SPSS (11.5 version), and then we can compare the data between different groups through the statistical analysis.In discrimination experiment, the computer also runs the software of Visplay. Every listener is assigned an answer sheet and required to choose answers on the sheet after hearing the pair of stimuli. The chosen item on the paper are:"相同"and"不相同". When these answer sheets are collected, the...