The Influence Of Foreign Accent On Mandarin Tones Processing

Intercultural communication has become more and more frequent in the recent globalized society.Since non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese have persistent difficulty in achieving native-like proficiency,they produce Mandarin tones with a foreign accent.The foreign-accented tones contain pitch errors.Mandarin Chinese is a tone language,in which lexical tones can distinguish meanings of words.Incorrect use of lexical tones leads to confusion/misunderstanding,such as,second language learner of Mandarin Chinese may pronounce“????(shui3 jiao3:I want dumplings)"as“????(shui4 jiao4:I want to sleep)" when she/he is ordering a meal.Thus,when native listeners try to understand the foreign-accented speech,it can be a kind of challenge.It remains unsolved that how foreign accent influences the processing of Mandarin tones.Event-related potentials(ERPs)are used to investigate the online processing of native-accented and foreign-accented Mandarin tones.How does the foreign accent influence the processing of Mandarin tones?Is there any difference in processing different tones(T1/T3:As entering the house,Xiaoming looked for his mother,and then called mom/mal;As visiting Mongolia,Xiaoming came to the prairie,and then rode a horse/ma3)?The experimental materials are recorded by a native Chinese and an English native speaker whose second language(L2)is Mandarin Chinese,and the participants are all Chinese native speakers.Results showed a larger N100 was elicited by foreign-accented T3 compared to native-accented T3.The N400 effects were observed between foreign-accented T1 and foreign-accented T3 conditions,and also between native-accented T1 and native-accented T3.These results indicated that the foreign accent influenced the online processing of T3 at the early stage of tone processing,and foreign-accented T3 required more attentional resources than native-accented T3.However,the processing of tones was not influenced by the foreign accent at the semantic processing stage.The semantic processing needed more cognitive efforts in T3 than in T1 both in native-accented speech and foreign-accented speech.