The Effect of Acoustical Similarity on Lexical-Tone Perception of One-Year-Old Mandarin-Learning Infants

聲調相似度對漢語周歲嬰兒聲調知覺的影響

10.6129/CJP.2008.5002.01

曹峰銘(Feng-Ming Tsao)

嬰兒語音知覺 ； 聲調發展 ； 聲學相似性 ； 方向不對稱性 ； native lexical-tone perception ； infant speech perception ； acoustical similarity of tone ； directional asymmetry

中華心理學刊

50卷2期（2008 / 06 / 01）

111 - 124

英文

在周歲左右，嬰兒的語音知覺能力經歷快速的變化。嬰兒開始呈現語言特定的知覺處理歷程，例如，開始降低對外語的語音音段（例如，元音與輔音）敏感度，同時提高對母語語音及超音段（例如，音韻規律）的知覺敏感度。然而，到目前爲止，只有少數的研究探討「聲調」，這個在聲調語言當中用來區分音節語義的重要語音單位。而且，尚無研究探索漢語爲母語嬰兒的聲調知覺發展。本研究的目的在於探究嬰兒對母語聲調知覺的發展，特定而言，檢視聲調之間聲學特性相似的程度，是否會影響嬰兒對不同聲調對比區辨的敏感度。周歲大的嬰兒(n=109)，參加以「轉頭步驟(head-turn procedure)」進行的聲調區辨實驗。其中一組分辨聲學特性差異最大的「一聲和三聲(n=33)」，另一組分辨聲學特性最接近的「二聲和三聲(n=36)」，還有一組區分聲學特性相似性在兩組對比之間的「二聲和四聲(n=40)」。結果顯示，一聲和三聲對比的區辨正確率(M=73.39%)，明顯地高於二聲和三聲(M=60.74%)及二聲和四聲(M=57.87%)的區辨正確率。此外，結果也顯示當嬰兒區辨一聲及三聲時，目標音節爲「三聲」會比「一聲」的區辨正確率高，也就是呈現「方向不對稱性」。但是此一現象只出現於聲學特性差異最大的一及三聲對比，其他聲調對比沒有此一現象。研究結果呈現周歲嬰兒的漢語聲調知覺發展情形。而聲調的聲學相似性對區辨敏感度的作用，也意涵一般聽覺發展機制在嬰兒發展母語聲調知覺上的重要性，以及周歲嬰兒對聲調聲學線索的處理特性與說漢語的大人不同。

Speech perception abilities undergo rapid changes around the first birthday, such as developing the language-specific phonetic perception and word segmentation, but only a few studies have examined the development of lexical-tones, an essential phonetic unit to distinguish the meanings of syllables in Mandarin Chinese. This study explored the native tone perception of one-year-old Mandarin-learning infants. Specifically, this study addressed whether the acoustic similarity between lexical tones affected infants' perceptual discrimination performance. Infants (n=109) were tested with the conditioned head-turn procedure when discriminating tone contrasts, Tone 1 vs. 3, 2 vs. 3, and 2 vs. 4, varying in the similarity of average fundamental frequency (F0) and F0 contour. Results showed that infants better discriminated tone contrast with greater acoustical differences (Tone 1 vs. 3), but they were less accurate discriminating acoustically similar tone contrasts (Tone 2 vs. 3 and Tone 2 vs. 4). Directional asymmetry was evident with the Tone 1 vs. 3 contrast, as the change from the background Tone 1 syllable to the target Tone 3 syllable was easier than the reverse. The results suggest that auditory processing is the essential mechanism for one-year-old infants to perceive native lexical tones, and that the perceptual mechanism for lexical tone in infants differs from Mandarin-speaking adults.

1. Aldridge M. A.,Stillman R. D,Bower T. G. R(2001).Newborn categorization of vowel-like sounds.Developmental Science,4,220-232.
2. Aslin, R. N.(1989).Discrimination of frequency transitions by human infants.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,86,582-590.
3. Best, C. T,McRoberts, G. W.(2003).Infant perception of non-native consonant contrasts that adults assimilate in different ways.Language and Speech,46,183-216.
4. Chandrasekaran, B,Krishnan, A,Grandour, J. T(2007).Mismatch negativity of pitch contours in influenced by language experience.Brain Research,1128,148-156.
5. Chao, Y. R(1948).Mandarin Primer..Cambridge::Harvard University Press.
6. Cheour, M(1998).Development of language-specific phoneme representations in the infant brain.Nature Neuroscience,1,351-353.
7. Eimas, P. D,Siqueland, E. R,Jusczyk, P,Vigorito, J(1971).Speech perception in infants.Science,171,303-306.
8. Gandour, J.(1983).Tone perception in Far Eastern languages.Journal of Phonetics,11,149-175.
9. Gandour, J. T,Harshman, R. A(1978).Crosslanguage differences in tone perception: A multidimensional scaling investigation.Language and Speech,21,1-33.
10. Gauthier, B,Shi, R,Xu, Y(2007).Simulating the acquisition of lexical tones from continuous dynamic input.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,121,190-195.
11. Goodsitt, J. V,Morgan, J. L,Kuhl, P. K(1993).Perceptual strategies in prelingual speech segmentation.Journal of Child Language,20,229-252.
12. Harrison, P.(2000).Acquiring the phonology of lexical tone in infancy.Lingua,110,581-616.
13. Hollich, G,Newman, R. S,Jusczyk, P. W.(2005).Infants`use of synchronized visual information to separate streams of speech.Child Development,76(3),598-613.
14. Howie, J. M.(1976).Acoustical Studies of Mandarin Vowels and Tones.Cambridge:Cambridge University Press..
15. Johnson E. K,Jus c zyk, P. W.(2001).Word segmentation by 8-month-olds: When speech cues count more than statistics.Journal of Memory and Language,44,548-567.
16. Jusczyk, P. W.(1997).The discovery of spoken language..Cambridge:MA: MIT Press.
17. Jusczyk, P. W,Friederici, A. D,Wessels, J. M. I,Svenkerud, V. Y,Jusczyk, A. M(1993).Journal of Memory and Language,32,252-293.
18. Kuhl, P. K(2004).Early language acquisition: Cracking the speech code.Nature Reviews Neuroscience,5(11),831-843.
19. Kuhl, P. K,J. Mehler,R. Fox. (Eds)(1985).Neonate cognition: Beyond the blooming buzzing confusion.Hillsdale:NJ: Erlbaum.
20. Kuhl, P. K,Stevens, E,Hayashi, A,Deguchi, T,Kiritani, S,Iverson, P(2006).Infants show a facilitation effect for native language phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months.Developmental Science,9,13-21.
21. Kuhl, P. K,Tsao, F. M,Liu, H. M.(2003).Foreignlanguage experience in infancy: Effects of shortterm exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA,100,9096-9101.
22. Kuhl, P. K,Williams, K. A,Lacerda, F,Stevens, K.N,Lindblom, B(1992).Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age.Science,255,606-608.
23. Li, C. N,Thompson, S. A(1997).The acquisition of tone in Mandarin – speaking children.Journal of Child Language,4,185-199.
24. Liu, H. M,Tsao, F,M,Kuhl, P. K.(2007).Acoustic analysis of lexical tone in Mandarin infantdirected speech.Developmental Psychology,43,912-917.
25. Madden, J. P,Fire, K. M(1997).Detection and discrimination of frequency glides as a function of direction, duration, frequency span, and center frequency.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,102,2920-2924.
26. Mattock, K,Burnham, D(2006).Chinese and English Infants` Tone Perception: Evidence for Perceptual Reorganization.Infancy,10,241-265.
27. Mattys, S. L,Jusczyk, P. W,Luce, P. A,Morgan, J. L(1999).Phonotactic and prosodic effects on word segmentation in infants.Cognitive Psychology,38,465-494.
28. Maye, J,Werker, J. F,Gerken, L(2002).Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination.Cognition,82,101-111.
29. Minagawa-Kawai, Y,Mori, K,Naoi, N,Kojima, S(2007).Neural attunement processes in infants during the acquisition of a language-specific phonemic contrast.Journal of Neuroscience,27,215-321.
30. Moor e, C. B,Jongman, A(1997).Speaker normalization in the perception of Mandarin Chinese tones.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,102,1864-1877.
31. Polka, L,Bohn, O.-S(2003).Asymmetries in vowel perception.Speech Communication,41,221-231.
32. Polka, L,Colantonio, C,Sundara, M(2001).Across-language comparison of /d/-/ð/ perception: Evidence for a new developmental pattern.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,109,2190-2201.
33. Rivera-Gaxiola, M. C,Klarman, L,Garcia-Sierra, A,Kuhl, P. K.(2005).Neural patterns to speech and vocabulary growth in American infants.Neuroreport,16(5),495-498.
34. Saffran, J. R,Aslin, R. N,Newport, E. L(1996).statistical learning by 8-month-old infants.Science,274,1926-1928.
35. Sebastián-Gallés, N(2006).Native-language sensitivities: Evolution in the first year of life.Trends in Cognitive Science,10,239-241.
36. Shen, X,Lin, M,Yan, J(1993).F0 turning point as an F0 cue to tonal contrast: A case study of Mandarin tones 2 and 3.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,93,2241-2243.
37. Sundara, M,Polka, L,Genesee, F(2006).Languageexperience facilitates discrimination of /d-ð/ in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of English.Cognition,100,369-388.
38. Trainor, L. J,Desjardins, R. N(2002).Pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech affect infants,ability to discriminate vowels.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,9,335-340.
39. Trehub, S. E(1973).Infants sensitivity to vowel and tonal contrasts.Developmental Psychology,9(1),91-96.
40. Tsao, F. M,Liu, H. M,Kuhl, P. K(2006).Perception of native and nonnative affricate-fricative contrasts: Cross-Language tests on adults and infants.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,120(4),2285-2294.
41. Tseng, C. Y..An acoustic phonetic study on tones in Mandarin Chinese.Taipei, Taiwan:Institute of History & Philology Academia Science.
42. Wang, Y,Jongman, A,Sereno, J(2003).Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of Mandarin tone productions before and after perceptual training.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,113,1033-1043.
43. Wang, Y,Spence, M. M,Jongman, A.,Sereno, J. A(1999).Training American listeners to perceive Mandarin tones.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,106,3694-3658.
44. Werker, J. F,Polka, L,Pegg, J. E(1997).The conditioned head turn procedure as a method for testing infant speech perception. Early.Development and Parenting,6,171-178.
45. Werker, J. F,Tees, R. C(1999).Influences on infant speech processing: Toward a new synthesis.Annual Review of Psychology,50,509-535.
46. Werker, J. F,Tees, R. C(1984).Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life.Infant Behavior and Development,7,49-63.
47. Wong, P,Schwartz, R. G.,Jenkins, J. J(2005).Perception and production of lexical-tones by 3-year-old Mandarin-speaking children.Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research,48,1065-1079.
48. Wu, Z. J(1986).The Spectrographic Album of Monosyllables of Standard Chinese.

1. 曹峰銘、呂信慧(2014)。兩歲遲語兒童的聲調知覺及其與詞彙學習的關係。中華心理學刊，56(4)，415-435。
2. 陳紹慶(2013)。體現認知的心理學觀點及研究取向。中華心理學刊，55(3)，405-416。
3. 劉惠美、曹峰銘(2014)。臺灣地區兒童語音知覺發展研究之回顧。應用心理研究，61，113-151。
4. 萬依萍(2021)。Interlanguage Tone Patterns in Thai Pre-school Children: A Preliminary Corpus Analysis。臺灣華語教學研究，22，1-33。
5. 謝怡欣、曹峰銘、邱建業、李菁芸(2009)。學齡前兒童塞音及聲調知覺與詞彙發展的關係。臺灣聽力語言學會雜誌，24，39-57。