The Relation Between L2 Tonal Perception And Production

Present study mainly probes into the relation between perception and production of L2 tones and the influence of L1 tonal experience on their relation. 35 subjects participate in our experiments, with 2 Putonghua testers and 3 radio and TV announcers composed of control group for extracting Norm of Mandarin tones; the other 30 subjects are recruited from 2^nd graders of Jinjiang High School with certain L2 tone experience learning Mandarin for about ten years and divided into Mandarin-monolingual group and Putian dialect-Mandarin bilingual group, each consisting of 15 subjects. Two tasks of same-different discrimination and picture-naming with monosyllabic Mandarin word are adopted to respectively assess the perception and production of Mandarin tones among Mandarin monolinguals and Putian dialect speakers. The results indicate that monolinguals perfectly align their L2 tone perception and production, but bilinguals only show this alignment in shangsheng (T3), and their perception precedes production in yanping (T2) and lags behind the latter in yinping (T1) and qusheng (T4); at the meantime, certain bilingual or monolingual also show somewhat uncorrelation to perceive and produce Mandarin T3, all of which support the Modularity of Mind from different perspectives. Furthermore, the alignment of L2 tone perception and production showing a completely different pattern for monolinguals and bilinguals: monolinguals' perception accuracy of four tones is high and production deviation is low, but bilinguals' production accuracy of T3 is low and production deviation is high, inferring the L2 tonal influence and L1 use on L2 perception and production because of different alternation of brain representations.