Relating Production and Perception of L2 Tone

This study investigated the production of the four Mandarin tones by a group of school-aged Spanish learners of Chinese (n=12) and a group of native Chinese children (n=4) with a mean age of 9.5 years. The participants were recorded in a quiet room at the school premises while performing an imitation task in which they produced 32 monosyllabic words embedded in a carrier phrase. Time-normalized pitch contours were extracted at 20 consecutive points, converted to logarithmic Z-scores to normalize F0 variation across talkers and submitted to growth curve analysis to compare the surface F0 contours of the four tones. A significant difference in the F0 shapes produced by the two groups was found for all four tones, but a significant difference in F0 height was found only for Tones 2 and 3. The findings suggested that native-like production of pitch contour may be more challenging than pitch height due to their relatively more complex f0-related laryngeal muscle activities and lesser attention to the former than the latter F0 dimension among non-native tone listeners.