The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Jennifer Alexander to work with Dr. Yue Wang at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
The overarching goal of this study is to increase our understanding of cognitive processing of speech sounds. Lexical-tone systems use pitch to signal word meaning; they exist in 70% of languages but are under-studied compared to segment (consonant/vowel) systems. The PI and host extend a well-studied model of second-language sound-structure perception (the Perceptual Assimilation Model, cf. Best and Tyler, 2007), which has traditionally focused on segments, to lexical tones. In doing so, they aim to determine the effect of native-language tone experience on perception of novel tone. Their first aim to evaluate whether and how experience with a tone language affects the organization of non-native tones in acoustic-perceptual space. In experiments 1 and 2, listeners use a free classification paradigm (Clopper, 2008) to classify native- and non-native lexical tones. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses are used to map and compare native- and non-native tone perceptual spaces. Second, they utilize the non-native tone perceptual spaces to examine how perceptual proximity affects identification of non-native tone categories; experiment 3 tests listeners? abilities to identify non-native tones that differ in perceptual proximity. Listeners are expected to more quickly and accurately identify tones belonging to contrastive categories present in their native inventories. Finally, they investigate how perceptual proximity affects discrimination of non-native tones. Using behavioral and EEG methods, experiments 4 and 5 test our prediction that listeners more quickly and accurately discriminate ? and are more sensitive to differences between ? tones judged to be highly dissimilar, relative to tones judged to be highly similar.
Complete understanding of the organization of linguistic systems, and of how these systems interact, is possible only through thorough investigation of all aspects of language. This study is among the first to extend cross-language speech processing theories to tones. Notably, this study involves listeners from a variety of L1s, toward a thorough view of non-native tone perception. In addition, it is one of the first studies to compare level vs. contour tone processing, and is the first to use EEG to investigate the effect of tonal L1 on the rapidity with which the auditory system detects acoustic differences between tones. A complete understanding of tone systems would aid our ability to expand, test, and modify theories of the world?s linguistic sound systems in general. Their data will be widely disseminated via scientific conference presentations and publications; the stimuli will be disseminated via a web-based speech archive. Thus, this study will inform and motivate future studies on tone systems. In turn, the knowledge gained from these academic pursuits should benefit various practical pursuits. It should inform approaches for teaching, learning, and communicating in a variety of tone languages, which might then lead to stronger ties with those whose primary language(s) are tonal. For instance, as the global marketplace grows stronger, corporations competing for international business may increase their demand for domestic employees who can easily communicate with tone speakers. Finally, this study will involve comparatively underrepresented subject populations (speakers of Igbo and Yoruba, from Nigeria).
