Long-term experience with a tonal language shapes the perception of intonation in English words: How Chinese-English bilinguals perceive "Rose?" vs. "Rose"

Abstract

Long-term experience with a tonal language shapes pitch perception in specific ways, and consequently Chinese speakers may not process pitch in English words - e.g., "Rose?" spoken as a question versus "Rose" spoken as a statement - in the same way as native speakers of non-tonal languages do. If so, what are those pitch processing differences and how do they affect Chinese recognition of English words? We investigated these questions by administering a primed lexical-decision task in English to proficient Chinese-English bilinguals and two control groups, namely, Spanish-English and native English speakers. Prime-target pairs differed in one sound and/or in pitch. Results showed specific cross-language differences in pitch processing between the Chinese speakers and the control groups, confirming that experience with a tonal language shaped the perception of English words' intonation. Moreover, such experience helps to incorporate pitch into models of word-recognition for bilinguals of tonal and non-tonal languages.