Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigation of second language lexical representation and processing of Mandarin tones

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

As the national language of the People's Republic of China, Mandarin Chinese has obvious importance in the modern world. Progress in our understanding of how Mandarin can be learned more effectively is thus of national interest for the United States. Mandarin is a lexical tone language, where pitch cues on syllables distinguish words. Learning lexical tones is known to be difficult for native speakers of English, however, the nature of the difficulty and its causes are not well understood beyond the earliest stages of learning. This project will address two main questions: First, what are adult second language learners' mental representations of Mandarin tone categories like? Second, what is the nature of the difficulty learners have during real-time word recognition? A first set of experiments will use behavioral measures of accuracy and response time to make inferences about the quality of listeners' mental representations for a specific Mandarin tone (Tone 3) and its variants (allotones). If learners' responses are less accurate or slower for one variant of Tone 3, this may indicate a bias in their perception, potentially due to common teaching practices that emphasize only one form of Tone 3. A second set of experiments will examine event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral decisions in response to spoken Mandarin words. Specifically, research will examine the N400 response to words and nonwords and compare it to the behavioral decisions that follow. While previous behavioral research suggests learners have severely decreased sensitivity to tones in disyllabic words, this new research will provide real-time evidence of learners' responses to tones, potentially revealing sensitivity that is not captured in behavioral decisions. Results will contribute to our understanding of the acquisition of lexical tones by adult second language learners and may lead to improvements in learning and teaching of Mandarin and other tone languages.