Discrimination of Cantonese Tones by Speakers of Tone and Non-tone Languages

Abstract

Listeners often find some non-native sounds difficult to perceive. For example, lexical tones in Chinese languages are difficult for non-native listeners to perceive, although pitch is frequently used in their first language (L1) and is not unfamiliar to them. We conduct a cross-linguistic study to explore the factors contributing to the difficulty of tone perception for non-native listeners.

Keywords

• Cantonese dialects-- Tone
• Tone (Phonetics)
• Sociolinguistics
• Intonation (Phonetics)