Examining the auditory approach: Lexical effects in the perceptual judgment of Chinese L2 tone production

Abstract Auditory perception is generally used by raters who are asked to evaluate the accuracy of tone production by non-native speakers (hereafter NNSs) who are learning Mandarin Chinese. However, its validity needs to be examined as the native speaking (hereafter NS) listeners’ lexical knowledge (i.e., knowing the possible combination of syllables and tones) may affect their judgments in different listening contexts. This lexical effect has been reported at the segmental level in non-tonal languages (McClelland et al. 2006; Norris et al. 2000). The present study extends to the suprasegmental dimension and compares NS listeners’ judgment on NNSs’ tonal performance of high frequency disyllabic word covering Mandarin disyllabic tonal combination in three lexical contexts, namely (1) hearing pairs of humming tones (syllables removed via Praat); (2) hearing disyllabic words (syllables + tones); (3) hearing disyllabic words + seeing target pinyin orthography. Statistical analyses revealed a significant effect of lexical contexts on the perceived tone accuracy, which increased when auditory and visual lexical cues were available, as in Conditions 2 and 3. Acoustic analyses further revealed the nature of the two lexical effects. Hearing words had a positive effect on the precision of the NSs’ tonal perception compared to hearing tones only. However, the visual presence of pinyin misled NSs to compensate for learners’ tone production deficiencies. The findings have implications for future research involving the rating of tones using auditory approach and also shed light on the teaching of Mandarin tones to NNSs.