Cumulative Enhancement in Naïve L3 Tone Perception: The Perception of Pitch and Phonation Type

Previous research has shown that tonal second language (L2) experience can enhance the third language (L3) tone perception of native speakers of non-tone languages. However, tone is a multidimensional concept, and phonation type also serves as an important cue in the tone perception of some tone languages. In this study, 38 native English speakers of different Mandarin proficiency levels, 15 native English and 15 native Mandarin speakers, all of whom were naïve to the Wenzhou Wu dialect, participated in an AX discrimination task. The Wenzhou dialect was used for the naïve L3 stimuli because of its breathy voice feature in the low-register tones. Mandarin Tone 3 (T3) is often realized with creaky voice, while in English, creaky voice is a prosodic and sociophonetic marker. We asked whether the exposure to one phonation type (creaky voice) at a different linguistic level (indexical in English, allophonic in Mandarin) could lead to better performance on another phonation type (breathy voice). Our results showed that in addition to its effect on pitch perception, Mandarin-learning experience was associated with higher accuracy in phonation perception for native English speakers, and high-level L2 learners could even outperform native Mandarin speakers. Longer length of Mandarin-learning and Mandarin-immersion experience had a facilitative effect on naïve L3 tone perception, resulting in higher accuracy in the perception of both pitch and phonation to varying degrees. Moreover, the study demonstrated that acoustic similarity significantly affects pitch perception in the initial stages of L3 processing, with acoustically similar tone pairs posing greater perceptual difficulty than dissimilar pairs.