Abstract

This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of language-specificity in the auditory perception of Chinese tones. Chinese and American English (AE) listeners participated in a series of perception experiments, which involved short ISIs (300ms in Experiment 1 and 100ms elsewhere) and an AX discrimination (limited set in Experiments 2 and 3, speeded response in Experiments BJ, RG and YT) or AX degreeof-difference rating (Experiment 4) task. All experiments used natural speech monosyllabic tone stimuli, except Experiment 2, which used sinewave simulations of Putonghua (Beijing Mandarin) tones. AE listeners showed psychoacoustic listening in all experiments, paying much attention to onset and offset pitch. Chinese listeners showed language-specific patterns in all experiments to various degrees. The most robust language-specific effects of Putonghua were found in Experiments 1, 3 and 4, where the T214 (as well as T35) neutralization rule shortened the perceptual distance between T35 and T214 (or that between T55 and T35) for Chinese listeners. Cross-dialectal as well as age differences were observed among Chinese listeners in Experiments BJ, RG and YT

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